The Cabin : On Failures of the Imagination and Lonely Days in the Woods

In the cabin I liked it so it really stank. I would get the smells on my hands and over my clothes: gun oil and kerosene for the lamps, wood smoke from the stove and the smell of cigars in everything. * Inside, the cabin was filled with the signs of decay. The log walls were darkening, the floor was aging and nicked up, the wood in the wood box was checking. Most things showed the signs of use and age, and the smoke and the oil got into everything. * Once, when I’d been away for a while, I went out to the cabin on skis and found it had disappeared--all except a foot of chimney--behind a hummock of snow. I often saw the fox standing out in the field and, occasionally, I saw deer in the browse at the edge of the field. * I only saw the bear once, a sow and two cubs, at the pond below the field; but I saw the tracks twice more--one winter in the flower beds around the house, and one spring on the pond ice just below the cabin field. * It was too early for signs of the bear that spring, because the snow was deep, and though we’d had a day or two of thaw, we were due for at least one more month of true cold, so the bear should have been asleep. I worried a bit for my little girl playing around the house, and kept a large-caliber pistol in the kitchen, on top of the cabinet with the glasses. * The pistol lay on top of the cabinet, next to two large mustard-ware bowls and two maple sugar molds. It was pushed to the back because the child said it frightened her. I never told her it was there. * I took it, shoved behind my belt, when I walked in the woods. * It made me feel a bit overburdened and foolish, occasionally, but I knew that black bears sometimes attacked, though I knew these attacks to be exceedingly rare. I fantasized about being the victim of one, and of dying unarmed in deference to a mocking voice that was, finally, just another aspect of my fantasy. * In any case, one day in early fall I was walking in the woods, practicing a silent walk in preparation for hunting season. * I moved very, very slowly, lifting one foot forward, and not transferring the weight until the forward foot was absolutely and silently placed. * When you move like that time slows down. Just as when involved in a meditation, body and breathing fit themselves to the environment and one becomes increasingly calm and aware. * I was moving slowly through the woods. Glacially, almost, or so it seemed to me--when the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt something in my head, in the back of my head. Something like a shock--the physical equivalent of an intuition--and I smelled this stench, very like a skunk, though not as unpleasant; a sharp smell. And I realized that my body had frozen, and that what I was smelling was a bear, very nearby.

I heard him then, a bit behind me and to the side, moving off through the woods, and I knew he was reacting to my reacting to him, as we react when we feel ourselves observed. After the bear moved off I left the woods.

The clean smell of the winter must smell like a beautiful death, like a fall from a great height; complete exhilaration.

I remember that smell in the back of my nostrils; it smelled like a “snap,” going to school on impossibly cold Chicago mornings, and I associate it with that smell of the woolen scarf wet from a runny nose and frozen to the face.

I think I was happy in those clothes because my mother was dressing me, touching me and making me warm; and I think that must be how someone feels in the euphoria of freezing to death, that the woods are taking him home.

People say that the Indians venerated Vermont. That they worshiped, hunted, passed through but did not make their homes here, because they held it as a sacred spot; and, indeed, many of my memories of Vermont are touched by both a joy of being alive and a consciousness of death. Once, when I had pneumonia, I felt myself slipping into it; and once, walking the land when I’d first bought it, carrying a survey map and a compass, I became lost. It was February, and I was deep in the woods. I had been walking quickly and I was warm, but the sun began to go down suddenly, and I stopped to get my bearings, and I became chilled.

I realized that I was turned around and consulted my compass. In a panic, I refused to believe what it said. It pointed one way to the road, and my recollection and instinct pointed me the opposite way, and so I thrashed around in the woods, my clothing wet and cold, the cold seeping into my body, as the sun went down, and, in a happy ending, I stumbled, thankfully and quite by accident, across the road. In the case of the pneumonia, a friend called and came over and took me, in my three-day delirium, to the hospital.

But one day, of course, there will be no accidental road, or antibiotic; and perhaps I delude myself, but I think that it will feel somewhat familiar and, perhaps because of that, somewhat less frightening when that day comes. And there are days when I look forward to it.

In the cabin was a dartboard. I would throw darts into it, and should my score surpass a certain point, then I would say that something I’d predicted would or would not come to pass--depending on the agreement that I had made with the divining dartboard prior to my throw.

But, as I think back, I cannot remember what the event (for I think it always an event of a certain type) was to be. It was, I think, something both good and improbable. And I would link the ability of my subconscious to overcome both my desire for the event and my lack of skill with the likelihood of the desired event. I would, in effect, pray for grace.

And I would pray for grace through the medium of solitaire, which I would play by the hour to while away the working day. But my target shooting, another beloved activity coming under the general description of “writing,” was another matter. It was always a more serious concern, and success in it or failure were my own fault and no added burden on the deity.

I would proclaim to anyone around me that I had to Go and Work, and having made the proclamation, would go off to the cabin, happy with my happy fiction. To have to Work never failed to excuse me, or so I thought, from any activity whatever.

Now, I leave for a moment the question of my feeling the need for an excuse, and address the question of superstition. I was so protective of my work, and so superstitious, lest I draw the interrogation of the uninitiated and so anger the gods, that the only time I would refrain from the excuse of Pressing Work to extract me from an undesired situation was when I was actually working.

Otherwise, though, I would sit in my cabin and read, or nap, or throw darts, or play solitaire, or shoot targets; or I would smoke cigars and look out of the windows.

I would look out of the window and see the deer, or, on summer evenings, see the beaver on the pond. I would look for the moose; I’d seen two moose up the road once, years ago, and others had seen them on my pond, and I felt that one day I would, too. I’d watch the ducks; I’d look for the blue heron. It used to be the heron would be back once every two years. Then he was gone for a while, but last year I saw him. The animals, of course, were like solitaire, a sign of grace; and grace increased somewhat with the rarity of their appearance. Although once I saw the mountain lion dart across the north road at dusk, like a fierce, muscular house cat five feet long, and it felt like something other than grace.

And twice in two days one summer, leaving the cabin just at dark, I heard dogs or coyotes in the woods tearing down a deer, and the sound of the deer barking and the dogs chasing him back into the woods, and circling the cabin and chasing back into the woods.

I would sleep for a while, many times, at the end of the day, before I walked back to the house. Sometimes I would wake in a snowstorm. The cabin would be dark, the fire in the stove would be finally out--waking, you knew it first because you couldn’t hear the hum of the fire, then you felt the cold--the wind would be pounding the west side of the cabin, coming up from the pond.

There is calm that comes, I think, from the absence of electricity. I think the body recognizes and reacts to being encased in a structure through which electricity is flowing. I think the body, in some way, pulsates sympathetically with the electricity, and that the absence of electricity permits the re-emergence of a natural calm.

This may, perhaps, be just my prejudice for the archaic, but I don’t think so.

In any case, my cabin is heated with a turn-of-the century Glenwood parlor stove. It is a black iron box about 3 feet high, 2 1/2 feet wide, and 1 1/2 deep. It sits on a small base that rests on chubby, foliated, bombe legs that lift it 10 inches or so off the floor. It has a small chrome bumper and chrome knobs on its front-side loading doors. It possesses a top piece called, I believe, a “victory,” which rises in Victorian uselessness, in a sort of inverted cup-like affair. The victory is both black iron and chrome, and very impressive. I have stored it somewhere safe and, I am sure, shall never remember where it is, let alone see it again.

The stove is both more beautiful and more useful without the ornament. It is now flat on top, and one can heat water or burn wet socks on it. The flat top is most useful for gauging the stove’s temperature, and I refer to the different visual and auditory properties of spit on a hot stove, and their application as a thermometer.

Light, when I infrequently stay past sunset, comes from various glass kerosene lamps and a few hammered-tin candle sconces. The combined smell and sound of the fire in the stove, the thwicking of the kerosene lamp, and the wind beating on the side wall exceed all attempts to imagine it.

Next to my desk hang photographs of my four grandparents, and notes for projects long done, and for projects never done and never to be done.

The desk is an old walnut roll-top, circa 1860, with beautiful hand-carved pulls and a ratty green baize mat for a writing surface. The mat is ink-stained and torn at all edges. The pigeonholes hold various memorabilia of my life and of the lives of others. Trinkets, in short.

On the desktop are several bottles of ink and a brass container made of an artillery shell, crudely engraved with the symbol of George V and the name H. Stimpson, souvenir de la Guerre. I put paper clips in this box, and pens and pencils in an old Dundee marmalade container. There is a Winchester loading tool for the .38 Long cartridge, and a Colt model 1878 .45-caliber revolver, both of which function as paperweights. There is also a glass paperweight from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and another in the shape of a horseshoe and made of pewter. The horseshoe has surmounted on the apex a crest that reads “French Lick Springs Hotel: Home of ‘Pluto’,” below which is written “The Kentucky Derby.” Also on the desk is a small rock my daughter gave me many years ago, and a ream of yellow paper.

It seems that I always have either too much or too little paper. Either, it seems to me, I am writing in a complete frenzy, and the ream has disappeared, or I have been staring at it for months and it refuses to diminish.

In the desk’s various pigeonholes are various note papers, a jade pig half an inch long, an unused pocketknife issued by the Knife Collectors Assn. of America in 1985, a tape measure made by the Otis Elevator Co. as a promotional item around the turn of the century, a medal the French government gave me for translating a play some years back, some old postcards, a pair of my eyeglasses, a blue Tiffany’s box full of calling cards with my name on them.

On the wall, near my grandparents, are handprints from my two daughters, both age 1 or so, a detective badge from New York state, and another from Chicago, numbered 26.

Stuck to the squared cedar logs of the cabin are notes and memos, a small corkboard full of commemorative buttons (Eugene Debs, Lindbergh, Roosevelt-Cox, Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, for a sampling).

There is a country-checked couch; on it is a Pendleton blanket a friend gave me. There are two wood boxes, one for logs and one for kindling. I filled them both years ago and have left them untouched since then, as I take my wood from the large pile out on the covered porch.

On the porch is a wind chime made of hammered-out spoons and forks. My daughter gave it to me several years back on Father’s Day. There is the skeleton and shell of a turtle placed on one of the ends of a log that extends beyond the square.

Many of the impediments in the cabin were acquired in the area at antique shops, yard sales and auctions.

The best country auctions are the estate sales. In these sales the entire contents of a home--usually house, barn and outbuildings--are taken out onto the lawn, a tent is set up, and the auctioneers dispose of it all, treasures and junk, the personal and non-personal, the beautiful and the awkward, to the highest bidder.

We in the audience wonder at the tenacity and perversity that would drive the human being to accumulate so much. We see objects speaking of the tastes, needs and follies of the collector, and feel ourselves, in our contemporary and personal insights and knowledge of the worth of things, superior to the person whose goods are out on the lawn.

Some things we will treasure because of their contemporary fashion, some because of their associations for us and some out of love or pride for our ability to intuit the associations of the former owner.

One day, probably not in my time, but perhaps it will be, the contents of my cabin will find their way out onto the lawn, and people will marvel over the folly or the prescience of the collector, and they’ll come into the cabin and probably nod to themselves in appreciation of the workmanship, and they may look at the window that, as I write, lets in light over my left shoulder, and see the deep pencil mark at a slant across the sill, and written under it, “18 May.”

I put the pencil mark there to shown noon, on May 18, some year when I was sitting out here writing.