Visiting the Homestead

Addendum #52

A few weeks ago my wife and I were in Maine and we went back to see the off-the-grid house in the woods where we lived for over twenty-three years and raised our two children. Our coming at the moment we came was serendipitous. The former owner’s son who had inherited the house was there with his partner. His father had been a minister who used the house as a spiritual retreat of sorts for which it was well-suited. They welcomed us and we talked about the house and the town and a bit about the memoir I wrote about our time in the woods. When we had arrived, the son had been up on the roof patching where a chimney had been. I knew that chimney because my wife and I had built it and I remembered patching around it to keep out the ice and snow.

Both the cement block chimneys we had were gone, replaced by a metal chimney or in the case of the kitchen cook stove not replaced. The cook stove, however, still was there, a formidable, cast-iron presence forged in Maine in the early twentieth century. Basically, the house is as it was when we lived there: no power poles, the pitcher pump in the kitchen, an outhouse, wood heat, kerosene lights. Simple living in what our son liked to call a “glorified cabin.” The flowers and vegetable garden were gone replaced by lawn, though a pear tree kept on and was full of fruit. Never pruned, it had reached an absurd height. Standing inside the house, I felt a flood of bittersweet feeling: this was the place where I came to know the earth in ways that dwarf my words. A depth of being once more made itself felt, a particular feeling, at once vast and modest, cosmic and workaday, that went with the house.

The house was one large room downstairs with a loft above some of that room and with two bedrooms attached that were for our children. Sitting in a clearing, the house looked like something a child might draw: mullioned windows, a door on the side and one on the back for the porch (the original screens were still up), a chimney, two skylights, as if to say: “Here is a human abode. Make of it what you will.” And the questions that came with the house: “Do you need anything more than this? Isn’t ‘more’ a distraction that takes away from your humanity and your engagement with the earth that sustains you each day and which you largely take for granted? Why isn’t love of the earth enough for people? Why are they so conceited and restless? Why can’t they be still like the house? Why can’t they practice peace? Why all the hustle and bustle when each day brings them closer to death? Where is their appreciation for what they have been given?”

Maine offers its share of melancholy answers to these questions, answers typified by the fallen-down, abandoned farm house of our long-time neighbors who died around 2000. Driving by their house, once an epitome of rural tidiness, gave me a terrible pang and made me feel once more why I left the house in the woods. I could never drive by Clifford and Ruth’s ruined house each day. The feeling would have been too much. That situation of too much feeling typified what I have been up against and have continued to be up against—more feeling than I knew what to do with. If you were inclined to be honest, you could say this of any human being, though the extent of the feeling is pushed away, buried alive, or ignored in the rush to do better things than wallow in the pangs of transience. That makes sense but I can’t say I have ever had much use for that sense. Something in me understood Thoreau’s instinctive aversion to groups. Individuality meant that a person stood by those feelings and, as best a person could, respected them. When I recently walked into a busy bakery a week or so ago here in Vermont, a space full of the buzz of people purposefully enjoying themselves while talking their heads off, I felt I was in an ante-room of hell. Too extreme a reaction no doubt but for me a real one.

Building our house put us in the context of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, people who wanted in the words of Joni Mitchell, “to get back to the garden.” We were, however, idiosyncratic since we were constructing a mental universe at the same time, a place compounded of ancient Chinese poetry, flour we ground in a hand cranked mill, cold mornings when we were getting the wood stoves going, and silence. The wind spoke and various creatures spoke, such as cicadas, crickets, and owls, but the silence got into my bones and put me in a very different place from the hubbub of news that characterized the society-at-large. Emerson’s “why so hot little man” became real to me. To live in a society dominated by a caricature of conceit is hard but the conceit has always been hard for me, that relentless placing of the human enterprise, however wrong-headed and destructive, at the top of the list. What is this “news” that is trumpeted each day? Are the pine trees listening to it? The tree swallows? The boulders that we dug up?

I’m glad to have met people who care about the house and who feel the peace the house embodied. The house did not rid me of my own demons but it made me feel how solid and tenuous my tenure on the earth was, how I belonged here during my brief time as a human being. I had made a home and I carried the home with me even after I left the home. Homes are like that. Our home in the woods was a gesture that we lived in—impractical and practical at the same time. To say it ran counter to the course of the technology-obsessed world-at-large would be an understatement. Standing there, however, in the clearing and in the house, I felt how right we were in our impulse. We were honoring what should be honored.