But Cat was loving it. To me she said solemnly, “Good to know. I’ll be careful around her.” To Diz she said, “Yes. And she’s mine. My antidote.”
Diz chuckled, then said, “Well, enjoy your stay. And now, as the radio guy says, I gotta get back to work.”
As Diz turned away, Cat added, “But we’re not gay!”
That cracked Diz up. She slapped her thigh and gave us a get outta here wave and stumped off toward the lower pasture.
I was pleased they had hit it off. Cat has a kind of momentum to her personality, and like it or not like it, it tends to sweep people along. She’s not judgmental of individuals, and she doesn’t care much about other people’s judgments of her. Perhaps that’s the definition of “irrepressible.” I envied her clear sense of self and the freedom it gave her, and I wondered whether Diz might have been a bit like her in her younger years.
We’d spent all of five minutes on the farm, and my three days with Cat had gotten off to a great start.
We crossed the road and Cat went to her car and got in the driver’s seat. When I asked her what she was doing, she looked puzzled and asked, “Aren’t we going to drive up now?”
“Drive? I thought I mentioned that. We have to walk from here on.” I pointed out the paired wheel ruts, the ground humped high between.
We unloaded her little backpack and a large duffel and her purse and a huge rolled Coleman sleeping bag and a fat copy of the Boston Globe and the twelve-pack of Heineken. Cat’s flip-flops proved unworkable when we hit the first steep part, so we stopped for her to dig some running shoes out of her luggage. The manure odor swelled up from the fields here—a dark, deeply fermented smell that I’d learned to tolerate but Cat almost gagged on. A couple of deerflies found us, swinging in tight elliptical orbits and landing surreptitiously to bite, and I realized that my insect repellent was up at the camp.
Cat stayed game, though. When we started walking again and the flies didn’t leave us, she growled at one of them: “Keep it up, asshole. I am going to squish your guts out of your crispy little exoskeleton. Believe it.” But we couldn’t swat them with our arms so full. The best we could do was to toss our hair. One got in a good long suck just behind Cat’s ear before I spotted it and elbowed it away.
Cat was fit, but slogging on uneven ground, steeply uphill, carrying armfuls of irregularly shaped things, was not easy for her. The twelve-pack was particularly hard to clutch. We had to sit and rest our arms. The bright side was that with our hands free we were able to take several deerflies out of the gene pool.
And it gave me a chance to show off the valley. From the first hairpin turn of the track, you get a lovely overview of the farm. Looking to the right, you have a longer view over the fields and copses and hillside forests. You can follow the meander of the stream on the far side of Brassard’s land, and then, as the valley broadens in the distance, a few silos and, beyond them, several strata of higher hills, hazed successively paler blue even on clear days.
Cat nodded approvingly. “It’s not The Sound of Music, but I can see how this could grow on you.”
Up at the camp, we dropped her stuff and had beers. We sat on my fireside logs as she caught me up on her life and our immediate circle of friends. But the blackflies began to find us, more and more until it seemed we were in the center of an aerial dogfight between scores of tiny fighter planes. We sprayed each other with repellent, got some on the lips of our beer cans, spat when we drank again. Cat went to pee and came back with dirt on her elbows that told me she had found the woods squat difficult. I had, too, at first: brace your legs on either side of the hole, drop your pants into a wad around your ankles, hunker down, try not to lose your balance, hold the clothing out of the way so you don’t piss on it or your heels. It takes practice.
We went for a walk; I introduced her to my spring, and we brought back water for cooking and washing. As we talked, I began to assemble the campfire. I had planned our first dinner with the idea of impressing Cat that you could live in Stone Age conditions yet still enjoy decent cuisine. So I’d bought some locally made fresh linguine and a can of clams, a box of already washed spring salad with lots of baby arugula, and some white wine. In retrospect, I realize I was romancing my friend, trying to seduce her into accepting my … what, choices? Lifestyle? Life?
As night seeps into dense woods, a fire is a lovely thing. It puts the palette all into contrasts and complements: orange against deepening green, bright against dark, motion against stillness. The air slides down from the higher places, chill, but the fire’s warmth holds it at bay. Its vital pulse and flicker promises warmth, food, light, companionship. There is no appliance, no computer or TV or microwave or lamp, with comparable powers and assurances.
Dear Cat got it. She really did. She fell into the spell, and as I tended the fire and the pasta we talked as we hadn’t in years. Neither of us was by any means a mate-seeking single—we scorned that trope—but we both thought that eventually we’d like to be with one person and explore the depths of intimacy rather than the range of options.
When the mosquitoes drove us into the tent, I lit candles and a gas lantern and we had a truly delicious dinner. We killed the bottle of wine, and Cat produced a little bottle of brandy. After a couple of toasts, she looked drowsy—she’d had a long day, what with the drive—so we laid out her bedding. Then we both needed to use the “outhouse.” It proved complex in the pitch dark. We both were unsteady, so we stumbled and thrashed through the undergrowth. And it’s impossible to hold a flashlight when you’re using both hands to stabilize yourself and manage your clothing, so I went with her to assist with lighting. Then she did the same for me. Not much privacy. Lots of mosquitoes. The whole exercise took probably twenty minutes. We were in absolute stitches throughout.
When we got back, Cat had to remove her contacts, and we discovered how hard that was without bright lights, a sink, smooth surfaces, a good mirror. She had brought silky pajamas to sleep in, but I told her she’d freeze to death, so she wore her sweatpants, socks, and hoodie pullover to bed.
We blew out the candles, and when I turned off the hissing Coleman lantern the night sounds came around us for the first time. I could hear Cat shifting uncomfortably, scratching at bug bites.
“It’s like this every night?” she whispered.
“Sometimes it’s windy or there’s rain. Then it’s very different.”
“Do you ever get … nervous?”
“Like, afraid of the dark? Always.”
A long silence, a distant owl quoting the Beatles: goo-goo-ga-joob.
“Are there animals?” she asked.
“I’ve seen deer. Raccoons. Mice. Cute little snakes. Mostly I see porcupines. The buggers come into the camp and chew on things, so sometimes I have to get up and chase them away.”
“So that’s why you sleep with the shovel by your bed?”
“Yes,” I lied. It was there for wolves and mountain lions and serial killers and, when the night fears were upon me, chupacabras and aliens and demons of the earth. “There aren’t any animals that’ll hurt humans here in Vermont.”
Another long silence. “Don’t you get lonely?”
I was going to say, “Of course!” because I was very much, increasingly, missing the company of other people, Cat, a man, my Boston friends, my long-lost brother. At night, I cried for the absence of everyone I ever loved, and I felt small and anguished by my solitude.
But I had also realized that in the woods there’s another set of feelings that we mistake for more familiar emotions. Sometimes the loneliness here was a feeling for which I had no name. It had to do with being supremely aware of existing as a separate, unique self, not a cell in a larger social organism. I suspect that many people spend their entire lives without once experiencing that. In a way, “loneliness” demeans it, stressing the absence of others, but this feeling is a keen, strong sense of self-presence,
of standing sharp and clear and fully defined. Imagine you’re a small, bright fountain of light, urgent and utterly distinct against the night sky. That feeling. It is acutely solitary, disconcerting, but for me that particular species of loneliness is more like what we call “reverence.”
So I said something like, “Yeah. It can get really bad. But sometimes it’s in a kind of good way.”
She said, “Mm,” thoughtfully or wearily. After a while, I heard her snoring. I cherished the human sound as it folded into the night symphony.
We awoke to the clang of a cooking pot outside the tent. It was pitch dark, dead black.
“What?” Cat whispered.
We heard a thump and a ripping and dragging sound, and then a deep whuffle of breath and some more ripping.
“Porcupine?” Cat asked hopefully.
I groped for a flashlight, flicked it on and saw Cat sitting up wide-eyed, then shined it out toward the fire pit. Four orange eyes reflected it back, and it took me a moment to see that they belonged to two bears. From fifteen feet away, they looked gigantic. They had something on the ground and they’d been ripping at it with their claws.
They looked away from the light, as if unsure what to do.
“Oh, shit,” Cat quavered. Then: “I’ve got some pepper spray! It’s in my pack!”
Then we realized it was her pack that the bears were opening out into a scattered mishmash.
“Hey! That’s Cat’s!” I called irrationally. “Cut it out!”
The bears shied like horses at the sound of my voice. Then I found the shovel and beat the handle of my Buck knife against it, making a metallic racket, and they turned in place and moved quickly away into the woods. I kept my flashlight on until the crackling of twigs faded out of hearing.
“I forgot to mention the bears,” I said, pretending to be used to this. But my heartbeat was banging in my throat and wrists.
“Jesus, Ann! Fuck me, I thought we were gonna get killed! Get eaten.”
“They never hurt people. They’ve never come to camp before.”
I heard her breathing hard in the dark. “Fuck,” she said.
“It’s my fault. I should have told you about not leaving your pack outside. I was too pickled. I always bring everything inside with me so the critters don’t get at it.”
“That would have been worse—they’d have come in here for it!” After a pause, she said, “There goes my surprise. I brought a bunch of those good sausages you like. Thought we’d have them for breakfast.”
I was touched, and thanked her. We both took a long time to find sleep again, but probably for different reasons. I’m pretty sure Cat remained frightened they would return, but though I still trembled with adrenaline, I felt elated: I’d seen bears! Close up! They hadn’t killed me! There were bears on my hill! I had bears for neighbors.
We awoke in the morning to a steady drizzle. Cat’s pack was a mess, the sausages gone along with a box of granola bars. Her swimsuit and other essentials were ripped and soaked. The rain turned my tidy campsite into a sloppy mess. I made coffee and fried eggs on the Coleman stove in the tent. The eggs were great, but the bread I’d bought to go with had grown mold overnight, so we ate them with saltines and used our tongues to mop up the yolks.
There’s not much to do in heavy forest when it’s raining. Walking is muddy and slippery, and every low-growing tree or bush soaks you as you pass. The boughs sag and a haze rises, so views are short: more trees, more bushes, without the relief of windows onto sky, distant hills, fields. We stayed in the tent, chilled, until we got too claustrophobic, then gave up and hiked down wearing black plastic garbage bags for raincoats. We changed to dry clothes in the car, then drove to Montpelier, where we had lunch in a restaurant. Cat’s fly bites were swollen and must have itched like crazy.
I suggested that we spend the night at a motel, but Cat was determined to get a full taste of my lifestyle. We trudged back up the hill, ate some cold Chinese take-out, finished off half the remaining beers, and got sloshed enough not to care much about physical discomforts.
Chapter 8
The rain stopped that evening, and by noon on Thursday the sky cleared up, so we decided to take a walk. I figured we’d walk the borders of my land, then explore some of the country to the west.
“Let’s go on a real hike!” Cat suggested.
“Like …?”
“Like when you pack pemmican and water and spend all day. And have a compass and binoculars.”
“Pemmican?”
“That’s what we called it at Camp Watitoh. The Indians used it when they went on long hunting trips. A mush of nuts and raisins and M&Ms.”
“Indians had M&Ms?”
“They put in jerky instead.”
I had no pemmican ingredients and no compass or binocs, but we packed saltines, bananas, a chocolate bar, and two beers. We filled two water bottles. I put all remaining food in my metal-lined cabinet, and we went off uphill.
We found my uphill property boundary, the wall of tumbled boulders, then turned left and followed it as the slope descended toward Hubbard’s land. After the rain, the forest was sparkling, fulsome, glorious: brilliant green leaves sunlit through and translucent like stained glass, the shifting mottle of the forest floor, jack-in-the-pulpits, trilliums, ovoid pellets of deer scat, red squirrels skittering out of view and then, unable to contain their curiosity, peeping around a tree at us. Close to us, the birds went silent, but in the near distance, their songs rioted. Lots of blackflies, but we had doused ourselves thoroughly.
Cat got snagged and scratched more than I did, but she stayed game. Our conversation took on rhythms that varied with the terrain, the typical back-and-forth interrupted by silence when we had to navigate down tricky sections of slope or clamber uphill on all fours.
Matt had another new girlfriend, a total slut. Our friend Tom, a talented weekend sax player, had decided to make a career of it, going for a master’s degree in music from Indiana University; I should come down for his goodbye party in July. The new teacher filling my slot at Larson Middle School was okay but would never be able to fill my shoes.
We talked about Megan’s announcement that she was pregnant—twins, according to the ultrasound—and about Tomás’ alcohol problem, which had gotten to the stage of a yanked driver’s license and loss of custody of his daughter. Valerie’s car got impounded for unpaid parking tickets, which we all had warned her would happen.
Cat looked at me sideways as we descended to the edge of a rolling cornfield and began skirting it. “Don’t you miss it? Miss everybody?”
“Some of it.”
“I mean, I still don’t get why … Was it just getting away from that shit at Larson? Or, what, like, pique? At Matt?”
I ignored her question about events at school and answered the part I felt more confident with. “Matt? Fuck, no! Jesus!” A bit later, I grumbled, “‘Pique’ is hardly the right word.” This was understatement to an extreme degree. For me, our ending had been like shoving a beef joint through a meat grinder.
“I know,” she said apologetically. She understood the many levels of heartbreak and disillusionment it had meant for me.
“Actually, I’m still not sure I can stick this out. If I don’t find a job, I can’t live in the woods in winter, I’ll have to bail. I’ll still have to pay off Brassard, but I can scoot by with my savings until I sell the land.”
“You still owe him money!”
“Just ten grand. There’s some more money due from my aunt’s estate.”
She frowned.
“Everything was totally fucked, Cat! Everything! I needed to do something different. Something not in the city, not safely … ensconced among friends. Or trapped among former friends! Something out of my own ruts. I know, doing this doesn’t make sense, but it …”
“… seemed like a good idea at the time,” s
he finished.
Neither of us laughed.
We circumnavigated the field, putting in half a mile on the forest verge, coming out on a dirt road near a barn and house that I assumed were Hubbard’s. We headed south on the road. At noon, we stopped to eat some of our rations, resting on a tumbledown stone wall among the flurry of blackflies, nodding to the occasional passing cars.
After a few minutes of silence, Cat surprised me. “And what about men?”
“What’s a ‘man’?”
She laughed. “Personally, I’d think after Matt you’d want a torrid affair. Rinse the little shitbag out of your system.”
“I don’t have much ‘torrid’ in me at this point. Once I get a job, rent a place in town, I’ll be in contact with the human race. I’ll check out my torridity then. Vermont is very hip.”
She nodded equivocally. “So I’ve heard.”
Eventually, the sun’s heat wore us down and we turned back. We’d seen some lovely views, climbed a bit of cliffside overlooking the river, skinny-dipped in the cold clear water. When we headed back, we were tired enough to follow the roads rather than go overland. We walked past Hubbard’s farm again, then uphill to where our road intersected the ridge road.
I hadn’t explored the larger area much, because I’d been too busy setting up my domestic functions and inspecting my navel. In fact, I had never gone past the turnoff to Brassard’s valley. So I’d never actually seen “the trash that lives up the hill,” as Diz called the Goslants.
I think our encounter with them upset Cat even more than me.
Along the ridge road, the forest was heavy for a quarter mile, but just around a bend, the landscape changed shockingly. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a cut-over wasteland of stumps and brush through which blackberry canes and scrub trees had snarled themselves. You see this kind of place here and there in Vermont, looking like a World War I battlefield after the dead have been hauled away. Earnest had explained that the owners of this kind of land had clear-cut the trees and sold them off as logs or firewood—an indication of financial distress, trading the forest’s long-term productivity for quick cash. Just what Jim Brassard had refused to do. It’s no longer an ecosystem, but an aftermath of a place, ugly and desolate.