Living at the End of Time Read online

  A year later, in 1838, he and his brother started a school in Concord, one that shunned corporal punishment and followed an experimental curriculum that involved outdoor excursions. But after three years, partly because John fell ill, they closed the school, and Henry left teaching forever.

  Always adept in the practical arts, after his school failed he helped his family improve its pencil-making business, and by the 1840s he had totally refurbished the operation so that it was one of the most profitable and prominent pencil factories in the East. But Henry had no abiding interest in manufacturing or business. What he really wanted to do was write.

  He had written essays in college, and for years had fancied himself something of a poet, but he had had little published and had made virtually no money. In the spring of 1843, at the urging of his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he went to New York City to try to establish himself. But that, too, failed, and in the fall he was back home in Concord, never again to leave for any length of time.

  He worked in his family’s pencil factory the following year. He also wrote in his journals, took his walks, and occasionally went on excursions with his friends. On one of them, a boating trip up the Sudbury River, he and a companion accidentally started a forest fire that burned over the precious wood lots of several local farmers. By this time Henry had a reputation in Concord: a Harvard man who had never held a regular job, a writer who did not earn money for his efforts, a malingerer, an eccentric, a nature lover, and now a fire starter. And then, as if to confirm all the rumors, in the spring of 1845 Henry commenced the most rash act of his life.

  For several years he had felt that what he needed to become a writer was time and space. He had thought about building a small cabin on the shores of Flint’s Pond (now Sandy Pond) in Lincoln, but old man Flint, the owner of the pond, had refused to allow him to live there. In the hope of encouraging Henry in his writing career, Emerson offered to let him use some land he owned by the side of Walden Pond. Henry’s move to Walden on July 4, 1845, marked the beginning of his career. It also marked the foundation of a philosophy.

  Thoreau was not the first to live apart in order to delve into the heart of things, but he became the prototype for those who followed him. One does not live alone in a cabin in the woods and escape comparison with this man; and the longer I lived in my little Gothic cottage, the more I tried to counter his pure, spartan existence, the more I noticed that I too was under his influence. The trouble with Henry Thoreau is that, in so many ways, he got there first.

  I found myself following a pattern that recalled Henry’s. I would rise early in the morning and watch the unfolding of the dawn. These were for me, as they were for him, the finest hours of the day. Morning ablutions for me, however, were not quite so simple as they were for Mr. Thoreau. I was not so fortunate as to have a pond at my front door, although from time to time on hot mornings I would run down through the woods below my house and jump into Beaver Brook, which slides east below the ridge on which my house was perched. Washing myself and my dishes was slightly more complicated than it was, probably, for Henry. I rigged a primitive plumbing system in the cottage by installing a large water container in the loft and then running a pipe down to the kitchen corner, where I kept a small camp stove and a large copper urn to hold water. I would haul the water to the house in five-gallon jerry cans and horse them up the ladder to the loft to fill the tank. This primitive system of running water became something of an attraction. Visiting children, who in their daily lives would rarely drink anything as boring as water, would regularly draw off a cup from my copper urn. There is something fascinating about simplicity. Children know that. So did Henry.

  Showers were another matter, as were regular meals. I commonly cadged both at Jill’s house, from other friends, or at my old house. That year, once my erstwhile wife took up her new career, my child-care responsibilities increased dramatically. During the week I would often cook dinner for my children and myself at my wife’s house. Weekends I got in the habit of eating breakfast at my cottage, followed by a walk in the nearby woods and fields. I would also hold alfresco dinners for friends in my meadow, and on some evenings we would sit there late into the night, talking, slapping at mosquitoes, and watching the fireflies and the stars.

  I got a lot of advice from well-meaning friends after I moved into my cottage. Some suggested I run a wire up from my old house and install electricity. My brother Jim thought it would be a simple matter to run a garden hose up the hill to supply myself with running water. One person suggested, before I built, that I should simply get a trailer and park it in the woods. One of my constant advisers in matters of survival was a man named Mason who lived in the nearby town of Carlisle. He had fitted his house with a number of ingenious alternative devices for supplying himself with running water and electricity without reliance on the local light and water companies. Mason was an intermediary between the third world and the industrialized world. Lanky, with silky reddish-blond hair, habitually dressed in cotton or wool, he had a viewpoint on everything, including how to live in my house.

  We took a walk together one day out to the hemlock grove behind the house. On the way back we passed a small, temporary wetland not far from my cottage. He halted and dug a hole with a stick.

  “You know, you could drill a good shallow well by hand right here,” he said. “You could have running water. For that matter you could have hot water. You run the water into the house, fork the pipes, run one section through copper tubing wrapped around your stovepipe, set it up with a tank, and you’ll have hot water all winter.”

  “What will draw the water up from the well?” I asked.

  “Electricity.”

  “But I don’t have electricity.”

  “Get a bank of car batteries,” he said. “Once a week or so you carry one out and get it charged while the others do the work. You could get car radios for your house, speakers, lights. You could even get a TV.”

  “I don’t want a TV,” I said.

  “Well, that’s great,” he said. “That’s cool. I don’t want one either. But if I did . . .”

  Briefly, very briefly, I had considered the idea of trying to live a true back-to-the-land, self-sufficient way of life. The land certainly would have been able to sustain me. I had at least two arable acres, a small woodlot that could have provided a continuous supply of firewood, and, perhaps most important, I had the model of the past. For who knows how many generations, people who had lived in the immediate area not only had fed themselves by farming but also had grown enough to make a decent living. There were a couple of obstacles to my doing so, however, the main one being personality. I once read a profile of the successful self-sufficient farmer, and he or she (usually both, working as a team) turned out to be the opposite of me. The ones who succeeded, according to the survey, were introverted, somewhat antisocial, more comfortable with machines than with people, happy to work long, lonely hours all day. I loved working the land, growing flowers and vegetables, lonely dawns, hand tools and hard work, and a few introspective hours every day. But I also had come to cherish the diversity of the human community in urban areas, which is why I ended up outside Boston instead of in Alaska.

  Once, during the early 1970s, because of energy shortages, I attempted to live in a largely self-sufficient way. I had a large garden filled with staples such as corn, peas, and potatoes; I had a fine fat pig, a flock of good hens, asparagus beds, row upon row of herbs of all varieties, plus the usual staples such as cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes. I even grew rye and buckwheat one year and ground my own flour. It was a tidy little system, but it was hard work, and after a couple of years I noticed that a curious change had come over me. Before this experiment I used to revel in all kinds of weather. I would go out in sleet and snow; I loved to walk in rain; I enjoyed bad weather and would swelter with pleasure in prolonged, cricket-loud droughts. But once I started growing things seriously, I began to worry about the weather. I would feel uncomfortable in drough
t; I came to hate bean-soaking, fungus-nourishing rainy seasons; I watched the sky fanatically. In short, I stopped enjoying nature. By the time I built my cottage I had learned my lesson. I planted and weeded my flowers and vegetables and let the season decide which would live and which would die.

  During those years when I had conducted my experiment in self-sufficiency, I became interested in appropriate technology. I had met a man named Charles MacArthur, who had concerned himself with energy conservation issues since the early 1960s—long before they became fashionable. He was forever organizing events to advertise the efficiency of alternative energy systems. One such event was a car race in which the winner was not the first to cross the line but the one who covered a given distance with the least expenditure of energy.

  Among Charles MacArthur’s many abiding interests were toilets. He was one of the first in this country to install the Swedish Clivus Multrum composting toilet in his house, and he had had a number of run-ins with boards of health because the toilets were not technically legal, according to local bylaws. Some years ago MacArthur moved his small-scale technology operation from Connecticut to Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. He bought a defunct mill, put it back into operation, and began supplying electricity to himself, as well as to the town.

  Long before he moved to Maine, as a part of his research on composting toilets, he and an associate at the Smithsonian Institution ran across a set of nineteenth-century patents for an English device known as Moule’s earth closet. This ingenious toilet was simplicity itself. It was a box about four feet by four feet with a seat on top and a door in the back which opened onto a bin located below the seat. The system ran not on water but on peat moss. After using the toilet, one simply emptied a few cupfuls of peat into the box. Periodically the peat had to be extracted and composted for eight weeks or so. After that the compost could be reused in the bin, or used to fertilize a garden. MacArthur found that these toilets had been in use for a time in this country, and that they had worked. So he built one.

  I saw his earth closet once in Dover-Foxcroft, in a museum of modern and nineteenth-century energy-efficient and water-conserving designs that he kept in his mill; it was one of his prize displays. Somewhat to my horror, he opened the bin of the toilet he had designed (and used), picked up the compost in his hands, crumbled it, and invited me to smell it. It had a rich, earthy smell, a little like the soil in a freshly turned garden.

  Although he knew the earth closet had been sold in the United States, MacArthur was unable to find an original. He searched antique stores and museums, and while he found thousands upon thousands of chamber pots in all manner of fanciful designs, he could not locate an earth closet.

  There were a number of outbuildings connected to MacArthur’s mills, and one day he decided to clear out one of the buildings to make room for a new project. Amid the clutter of nineteenth-century paraphernalia he found a hinged box that had once carried a high varnish. The thing looked suspiciously familiar to him, so he cleaned it up. Beneath the layers of caked soot and grime, he found the brand name written in that elegant false hand-lettering of nineteenth-century advertisements: “Moule’s Earth Closet.”

  Toilets have never overly fascinated me, but this story of MacArthur’s earth closet stuck in my mind, and shortly after I moved into my cottage, I constructed one of my own. At one end of an earth-floored lean-to in back of the house, I dug a shallow pit in the soft piney soil. I built a box with a side door over this pit and lined it with peat moss and lime to make my very own outdoor version of Moule’s earth closet. I never told the board of health about this. The earth closet was probably as illegal as Charles MacArthur’s Clivus Multrum had been back in Connecticut. But it worked better than many of the septic systems in the town, which, whenever it rained, spewed a noisome effluvium onto lawns and streets. I had to clean out my earth closet only twice that year. I turned the compost into the garden, and in the rich humus I grew a rank garden of cosmos, stock, cleome, snapdragons, and perennials.

  I used to spend a lot of time in the mornings and then again in the evenings working in the garden. Living outdoors as I was, I gained a new appreciation of the subtle beauties of the change from day to night; the lonely, sparkling song of the wood thrushes and the veeries; the soft light, the fading colors. Often, after it was too dark to work in the garden, I would sit on my front porch and watch the display of the rising fireflies above the meadow. They made bright sparks against the black background of the night forest, brighter, it seemed to me, than anywhere else in the world, except, perhaps, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I first watched them.

  My father liked fireflies. We used to spend summers on the Eastern Shore at a rambling nineteenth-century summer house known as the Reed’s Creek place. It was set in the middle of a small grove of cedars and was surrounded by hay fields that rolled down to a wide creek where we kept a number of boats and a swimming dock. Often in the evening my father would go out onto the verandah on the west side of the house and sit in a rocking chair to watch the fireflies rise over the hay fields. He would reminisce about the Orient at these times and would often tell us the Japanese fairy tale of Princess Firefly. According to the legend, she was the most beautiful princess in the kingdom of the insects and had many suitors, none of whom she fancied. In order to hold them at bay, she announced that she would marry the one who was able to bring her a light that could match her own brilliance, and so all the lowly suitors rushed off to burning lights to try to steal fire. To this day they can be seen, still battering themselves against the light, still hopeful, after all these centuries.

  No doubt my father picked up this story from the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, who was one of the foremost interpreters of Japanese culture and the first person to collect the disparate folk tales and legends of Japan. While he was in the Orient, and perhaps even before, my father began reading Lafcadio, and years later, when he returned from the East and went on to graduate studies in English, he wrote his thesis on Lafcadio Hearn’s fascination with the supernatural. It was an odd choice. Lafcadio was a gifted linguist, a skilled translator, intensely interested in exotic cultures, in the mystic, the sensuous, in folklore, nature, and the dark side of human experience. My father, although fluent in Chinese, was not particularly interested in language, folklore, mysticism, or nature. His Protestant religion was decidedly earthly; he was far more involved with people than transcendent spiritual experiences. And yet there was something of the exotic Lafcadio within him, some of which he managed to pass on to me. Part of this I may have absorbed from the collection of Hearn’s works that I tried to read while growing up. Some of it may have sunk in during those lingering evenings on the night porches of the Eastern Shore while the starlike bursts of the fireflies flashed over the summer hay fields.

  Even there, however, on those peaceful evenings, my father’s voice would occasionally deepen into other tones, and we would know that we were about to be reminded of some tragedy—the plight of the Jews, the poverty of the Chinese, or the devastating power of the nuclear weapons that even then, in the innocence of the 1950s, seemed to him to be threatening the world.

  4

  Scyther’s Complaint

  SOMETIMES IN THE EARLY MORNING, while the dew was still on the grass and the air was still cool, I would mow the grasses in the meadow. I kept an old scythe hanging on the back of my cottage, and regularly that summer I used it to keep the grasses down. I never scythed with the singleness of purpose of the old-time mowers, who would rise on a given day, and, working in a crew of men and boys, cut an entire hay field before breakfast. I preferred to mow at leisure, working up from the lower end of the meadow to the western wall. In this manner, cutting a little each day, I never really finished—one section would grow back before I reached the end of the field—but at least I had time to daydream while I worked.

  Scything is for me one of the consistent small pleasures of life; the quiet swish of the blade, the fresh scent of new-cut grass, the little flights of retrea
ting insects, and the sight of dew-dappled stems have a calming effect on me. Scything through a grassland in early morning, surrounded by bird song and the chatter of insects, offers a continuity with the past that few other occupations provide.

  The scythe was developed with the cultivation of grains some five or six thousand years ago and evolved into its present form sometime in the twelfth century. It has voyaged through history with us, and only now, in recent decades, has fallen into disfavor, yet another victim of mechanization. But for my purposes, it is an eminently practical tool.

  In virtually all the houses I have lived in, most of them in rural or semirural areas, the lawn was a rough expanse that had been neglected by the previous owners and had evolved into a meadow of wildflowers. Over the years I came to love these wild lawns. They were far more interesting to me than a clipped greensward, devoid of all but a few species of grass and perhaps an ant or two. Maintaining these meadows to keep them from returning to brush was a problem, however. Once or twice I tried to cut the high grasses with a power mower, but it was noisy, hot work, and when I was done, where there had been a tangle of life, nothing remained but a brownish swath of severed grass stems. I quit using mowers years ago and began cutting with a scythe.

  One morning I was scything a small clearing down by the road below my cottage when my old friend Sven walked by.

  “Cutting in the old way are you?” he asked in his lilting Swedish accent.

  Sven was in his mid-eighties, and was an inveterate walker. I would often see him out on the road that runs along the eastern edge of the ridge, and I used to talk to him about the old days in Sweden. Ever since I first learned the art of mowing I have been interested in different scything styles, and I asked Sven to show me how he used to cut hay back home. He picked up the scythe and began cutting—not in a straight line, as we do in this country, but in an ever-widening circle.