July 14
I don’t understand anything about this, but I’m overwhelmed by gratitude for it. I have just been in proximity to a great mystery, on the dizzy verge of the unknowable. I’m trying to write by moonlight and it’s probably three a.m. and my fingers are clumsy as they try to scribble human words. As if I’ve come back from another shape. What just happened? What did I do? What part of me knew, what was I calling, what was calling me? I’ll never be able to tell anyone, because it is too incredible, people will think I was on drugs or dreaming or am lying.
I woke up from a sound sleep and went out into the darkness. In my pajamas and socks! The moon gave enough light to see my near surroundings. I was drawn to go into the woods, into new parts, into the deepest. With just socks on, my feet could feel each twig and shift to avoid snapping it, I didn’t step but rolled my feet over the dead leaves, making only the softest wrinkling noise.
I had no destination in mind, but I never hesitated or had to decide which way to go; there was only mindless certainty. I felt an inexplicable sense of high anticipation. It is like fear in that it comes on us in unknown places and makes us hyperalert and we don’t know why it’s there or what it means. We know it’s risky, but it IS NOT fear. It’s the call of mystery. That’s the only name I can think of for it. The call of transformation.
I walked toward nowhere and—this is the hardest to figure out—for no reason I began making a noise. With my lips pursed as if to kiss, I said, “shhhhhhh,” a shushing noise but long, falling from higher to lower and modulated at the end by tightening my lips, more like “shhhhhhhhew.” It was a long exhalation and very quiet. I made it at regular intervals, not with every breath but maybe five times a minute. It was purely irrational. I had no reason for doing it. Why would anyone do it? I was just doing it. I was supposed to. I drew in deep breaths and blew out “shhhhhhhew,” the noise of wind moving through pine boughs.
I went uphill for a while and then my body knew to head downhill and to the northwest. Probably I went well past my own borders onto I don’t know whose land. Very thick forest, trees bigger than mine, more pines and spruces. My eyes adapted to the dark more than I’d ever known they could; everything stood out clearly in that dim gray and pearl light.
After fifteen minutes or so I saw a special tree. It was about as thick as Earnest at the base, came straight up to waist height and then one wide branch, thick as I am, came out at a right angle, perfectly straight and horizontal for about four feet. Then it bent sharply and went vertical again, parallel to the main trunk, its high branches lost among the tree’s other limbs. I remembered that Pop called these “Indian trees,” claiming that in the old days the Indians bent saplings’ branches to point toward a route or place, then kept them trained that way, road signs in the woods. I climbed onto the horizontal part, feet up on the vertical turn of branch, shoulders against the main trunk. I kept making my long, whispered “shhhhhhhew.” It was crazy. Every fifteen seconds or so, I made that tiny quiet sound. No reason.
I lounged there. That feeling so much like fear was strong and it was wonderful—highly awake except no thoughts and no focus of attention. The woods so glorious, the moon very muted in the evergreens there. Windless. I lay, purposeless, just feeling the pregnancy of the night, expectant but of nothing I could name. Still making that noise.
After about twenty minutes, I heard a series of soft cracklings from the dark, growing closer, and a faint rubbing sound, something passing through brittle pine boughs. I didn’t startle, felt no fear, as if I knew it was coming. I just lay still, making my absurd noise. Then the opaque black at the periphery of my vision seemed to bulge and separate, and two big pieces of shadow came my way. They were bears, and instantly I knew they were the same ones who had visited my camp two years before, but much larger now. They were “my” bears. They rolled toward me and as they got closer I could just hear the faint deeper thud of their footfalls. Their muzzles were paler than their bodies and I could see them looking my way, round ears alert, then raising their heads to scent the air.
One approached me directly, while the other took a wider route. They made soft grunts to each other, quick short sounds like a noisy eater enjoying his food, but from deep within their massive bodies. I held perfectly still, lying in my wooden hammock, still making that absurd shushing whisper.
I can’t find words to describe my state. Not trepidation, more like intense exhilaration. It was definitely not fear, but the feeling, so much like fear, that is really just absolute alertness and aliveness. I knew them; I knew this was supposed to happen.
Within half a minute of their first appearance, they had moved right next to me. They looked up at me with benign curiosity. One came close and I felt its hot breath on my hand, which rested on my stomach. The other shouldered aside the first to do the same, then grunted amiably.
I kept making my sound, only now it was a sort of song I was singing about loving those bears so, so much and celebrating us meeting each other here and not being afraid of each other.
They were not alarmed to find me there, not even surprised. One partly stood and gripped the vertical part of my branch, its claws making a crackle on the bark, to sniff my feet in their wet socks. The other did the same on the main trunk of the tree to snuffle my face. Its face was only inches from mine, and its eyes were purely curious and devoid of ill intention. They seemed like human eyes, inhabited by an intelligent being, by a soul. Its huffing humid breath smelled rich but not foul. After a few seconds it got back onto all fours, took a few steps away, and sat down. It looked like a fat man resting, taking a breather for just a bit. The other bear came over to it and cuffed it lightly, affectionately, with one huge mitten of a paw.
They sniffed the air, then the ground, looked at me, looked around the woods, grunted a couple of times. The sitting one got back on all fours, came back to sniff my face again. Then it was time to go. They had other business to attend to. As they moved away, they craned their faces around to look at me one more time, and then quietly crackled back into the shadows, merged with them, and were gone. We had been together probably four minutes.
And I was finished, too. I stopped making that call. I was joyous, overflowing, and sated. I knew it was time to head back to camp. I had completed the intended errand.
I didn’t know the way, hadn’t paid any attention when I came, but I headed unerringly back here. I glided, my feet had learned the ground, I was sliding along in the silky diffuse moonlight.
Now I’m still so full of joy but my human self is flowing back into me again. Fatigue coming on, blissful, sleepy. What happened? How did I know to wake, to walk, to make that noise, to go to that particular tree? Never done anything even remotely like it. Never felt so at ease anywhere, never so, what, so guided? So released of intention, so without purpose yet so sure of what to do. Didn’t seek this, didn’t know there was this. I didn’t feel impelled by some instructive spirit being, just that emptiness with a story wound into it, me following the story where it went. Playing my part, surrendering. I never had a rational thought, like “bears are dangerous,” or its opposite, “there are no known instances of a Vermont black bear injuring anyone.” It wasn’t a sudden eureka wow epiphany of wisdom awakening in my soul. It was just an easy coming to know, a sweet destined gentle curious meeting of strangers, just the gentlest gift of knowing that could ever, ever be.
I did tell Erik and Earnest about the encounter, by urgent necessity, but this is the first time I have ever revealed it to anyone else. I know you might not believe me. But it explains how I changed and why I did what I did not long after.
My bear encounter: Now I think that’s how the pull of our larger destinies works, too. For no real reason, we go making a strange small noise, a secret song consisting of, oh, our way of talking, our ironies or mumbles, that Irish accent we affect sometimes, or the clothes we choose to wear, our habitual faces and moods, the music that’s on
our iPod, as we mosey along in our lives. We get that stupid tattoo on an irrational whim, we buy lunch from that particular falafel stand because we like to look at the Turkish guy’s thick mustache. We just do. We’re turning this way and that, finding our way in unknowing response to some irresistible gravitation. And others are drawn by it, equally unaware. If we even notice, we think we’re making choices, but really we’re just fulfilling the same impulse as my bear-calling “shhhhhhhew.” It’s just much larger and longer-term. We don’t know we’re making that random sound in all the ways we express ourselves, don’t know why we are who we are, don’t know we’re on such an inexplicable yet destined journey. We may not trust ourselves or the world that deflects us or lures us or obstructs us. But we blithely continue, heading toward whatever meeting awaits. And that’s how magic finds us.
Chapter 53
By late July, Erik’s hops had climbed eight feet up the coconut-fiber ropes he’d trained them to. Brassard said he’d never seen any plant grow that fast. Erik told him they had hardly started: In the next few weeks they would gain another six feet and then thicken as they exploded with cones. In all, he expected that each acre of trellis would be holding about ten tons of hops plants, all that mass sprouted from tiny shoots in just three months. If nothing went wrong, he would harvest perhaps three thousand pounds—after drying—of hops cones from the top three acres. The lower three acres, grown from rhizomes, would produce only half that in the first year.
Before the plants rose up their training strings, the trellis was an odd place, not pretty, with almost-straight rows of vertical poles connected at the top by wires, just like telephone poles. But once the bines climbed higher than my head, a hop yard became quite wonderful—a series of paths between near-vertical walls of foliage. Deep in the middle of the yard, it felt pleasantly secret, an enclosure like a topiary maze in an old English garden. When the sun beat hard on it, I could almost hear the bines reaching, stretching, spiraling upward with remorseless muscularity.
Though in many ways my life was now more coherent, I was living in several distinctly different worlds. To my days working on the farm, and to my time in the woods, I had added working among the hops alongside Erik and, often, Will. Earnest’s tree business kept him away three or four days a week, and when he returned he had essential farm chores to do. Earnest and I saw very little of each other, and at times I wondered whether he was deliberately avoiding me. I yearned to tell him about my bears—I knew he would hear it without skepticism and would understand the magnitude of it—but I never found the right time or place.
Will was working on a video project that explored new farming trends in Vermont, so he justified his hours of menial tasks among the hops, always with a camera, as possibly worth a few minutes of the planned forty-minute video. He had a hard time keeping Erik from clowning for the camera.
My miraculous night with the bears stayed with me. My mind turned it this way and that, but I still couldn’t slot it into any conception of the world’s workings I had ever known. I walked around with that wonder and reverence resonating inside. I held it against my heart like a precious thing, a gem of inestimable value.
This reverence—its violation—explains why I responded as I did when a Goslant killed on my land again.
One evening, I was wandering through my woods, loving them but also doing an offhanded inventory of straight hemlocks and white pines—by then I knew my trees pretty well—that Erik might use for another trellis should market demand call for more hops. I was looking up at trees, not at my feet. Up near my northeastern border, I stepped in something that slid under my feet and made me leap away. When I looked down, I saw another heap of guts on the forest floor. Another deer had been killed and field-dressed here, the abdominal contents left to rot.
Then a horrible thought came to me: Maybe the pile wasn’t from a deer. Maybe it was the intestines and organs of one of my bears. The thought came like a scream, and I nearly vomited. My night with the bears was transcendent, a guiding if baffling star in my personal cosmos. Killing one of them was beyond blasphemy.
This time, there could be no ambiguous rationale. It was simply poaching, out of season, illegal, on my well-posted land.
My boot was slimed with the wet of that pile. I stood paralyzed for a moment before I could leave the scene. It was fresh; flies were just starting to find the mess, buzzing and whining past me as they headed toward their feast.
I knew that one of the Goslants had done this, no doubt Johnnie.
You must understand that I bore the Goslants no ill will. I saw them as victims of institutions and history, and if they were hungry a quest for protein was entirely justified. But Brassard said Homer, the patriarch, had worked for decades on the state road crew, making decent money. Johnnie’s pickup truck was almost new and customized with fat chrome exhaust pipes, pin-striping, and spring-mounted double antennas. Several of the family were seriously obese; they weren’t hurting for calories.
I marched down the hill, furious and heart-wounded. The first person I encountered was Will, camera nearby as always, weeding the hills and trimming the bottom leaves from the bines. I was breathing hard and my face burned and it must have shown, because he said, “Jesus! What happened?”
I told him about the guts but didn’t mention my fear for the bears. He sat on the ground and signaled me to do likewise. My state alarmed him, and I knew that the idea of a confrontation with Johnnie frightened him.
“This is exactly the kind of thing we don’t need,” he said. “The others are just PPP, not so bad, but Johnnie’s a loose cannon. He’s got some bad-apple buddies, too. Best thing would be to call the Fish and Wildlife Department and have a state warden talk to him. But I doubt you could prove he did it.”
“What should I do? I can’t just let the little shit-ass fucker do this—”
“Let me go up to the Goslants’. I was born here, they’ll accept it from me better than you, some flatlander getting in their faces.” He cleared his throat and glanced away. “And I’m not a woman. And I don’t sleep out in the woods by myself up there.”
He turned to look at me, making sure I got his meaning: He would not be as easy a target for retaliation after a confrontation.
My fists clenched white on my thighs. Will saw them and put his hands over them, gripping lightly. “Annie. You gotta calm down a little, okay? Please? I’ll go up there. I’ll talk to Johnnie. We’ll sort it out.”
I declined his offer of intervention but thanked him and told him he was right, I should think about it and get a handle on myself. I left him to the hops and went back to the farm.
I found Erik sitting on the front step of the worker’s dorm, a rare moment of repose. He had been making phone calls to equipment suppliers and was taking a break. His restless hands whittled a stick with impatient strokes of his sheath knife. He nodded as I told him.
“Want me to go kill him for you?” he asked indifferently.
“Erik, come on!” Meaning take this seriously. Actually, he frightened me. He wore a denim jacket cut off at the armpits, biker-style, fabric frilled around the cut edges, his arms cording as he shaved off curls of wood. His forearm tattoo, if you didn’t know what it said, looked sinister.
“Relax, I was kidding. Well, exaggerating,” he said with no irony, glancing up at me, dead-eyed.
I saw an edge in him, maybe forged in defending his drug turf and surviving seven years in a penitentiary, and I realized I didn’t really know what my brother was capable of.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t do anything. I mean it. It’s my land. It’s my problem. Do you hear me?”
“Okay!” He looked up at me with irritation, then softened. “Okay.” He whittled some more. “But if they ever mess with you personally?” His jaw muscles striated and his knife flashed as he hacked a big chip off his stick. “Whole nother story.”
Just then Earnest came out of the
barn, and when he saw us together he walked over.
“What obtains?” he asked.
I told him about the guts and said that Will had offered to go up and talk to Johnnie. I wondered whether Earnest would volunteer, too. Of the three of them, he’d be the last person Johnnie would want to see on his doorstep.
“I’m afraid it might be one of my bears,” I blurted. The thought made my eyes tear despite my fury.
“Your bears?”
“I have a couple of bears that come around,” I hedged. “I … like having them there.” I couldn’t formulate words that would carry the enormity of my feeling. “They’re my … they matter a lot to me. They really matter to me!”
They absorbed my stumbling explanation and vehemence without comment.
Earnest blew out a long breath, then bit his lips as he thought about it. He looked at me as if weighing a decision, glanced over at Erik, brought his eyes back to me.
“Yeah, you should definitely go up there,” he said at last. “I mean you. On your own.”
I was shocked. He wasn’t trying to be funny. But I was terrified of Johnnie, of guns, of what might have happened to the minds of people like him, living in such financial and cultural poverty, envying the world they saw on their satellite TV and resenting that world for shoving them aside in every way unless they showed a willingness to violence.
“Yeah, right,” I said.
Earnest came up to me, looked me up and down, squeezed my biceps experimentally, finished by stroking my hair out of my face and staring into my eyes in a purely analytical way. “What d’you think, Erik?”
My brother caught Earnest’s eyes uncertainly. But he stood up and came over to feel my arms and then my shoulders, like a boxing coach checking his fighter’s readiness. He finished by bringing his hand down my back and, clowning, to my rear end. I swatted his hand. Earnest smiled grimly.