When someone asks me when something in my life happened, I often don't know: was it the 1990s? the 2000s? Yesterday? It was lucky for me, then, that I found a clue in my copy of John Hanson Mitchell's Living at the End of Time. Tucked into it was a bookmark: Phoenix New and Used Books, San Francisco, California. Aha. So I probably bought this book in the 1990s, when I had moved back to the city from the East Coast.
I moved back home because graduate school didn't work out, because my family was on the west coast, and because I needed to figure out what to do with my life. San Francisco was (and is) a gem of a town, sitting on its many hills. There was so much to do, so many interesting people, and more cultural activities than I could possibly take advantage of. Yet I always felt out of step. Most of my new acquaintances came from the midwest or the east, thrilled to be gone from the weather and their families, and happy to be launching into a new life.
Despite knowing that I was in a desirable place - one of the most desirable in the country - I missed New England. When I would say this to people, they would be incredulous: how could I possibly miss the cold? The humidity? I had no good answers, and felt I ought to somehow construct some kind of rational explanation for myself and others. But I couldn't understand my feelings myself, much less explain them out loud.
It was reading Mitchell's book, an account of his time in a handcrafted Thoreauvian cottage near Concord, Massachusetts, that gave me the answer. Not a rational answer, but a sort of feeling-answer. It was these sentences in particular:
In the clear, hot light of late morning, the woods beyond the stone walls had darkened to black, and the air over the field was nearly white. The indigo buntings were singing madly, the garden flowers were coming into bloom. . .
Something about this image of the dark woods (so many trees!) and the air heavy and visible with moisture, brought me right back into the landscape I missed. I was again acutely homesick for my adopted New England, but now I knew why. The place and the placeness of the place. My reasons for wanting to go back had no logical basis, but rather came from some inexplicable source, one which I still have not found, and may never find.
John Hanson Mitchell has written a number of books - nonfiction and fiction. He works at the Massachusetts Audubon Society, as the editor of their magazine, Sanctuary. He has a modest website which lists his books, and reprints some essays from the magazine:
http://www.johnhansonmitchell.com/...
Mitchell published Living at the End of Time in 1990; in it, he relates his experience living on a small ridge of forested land in Littleton, Massachusetts - not far from Henry David Thoreau's Concord. He and his wife had gone through a separation which would eventually lead to divorce, and the author needs to find somewhere economical to live. He tries living in an apartment nearby, but
. . .life was dull there. I sometimes felt drained and unconnected. I would go back to the ridge and walk around, and I would always come away with a sense of energy and renewal. The place had power; there was something about it that nourished me
Inspired by Thoreau, he wants to live more closely to the land, simply, without barriers. And he wants to live in this specific place, because it holds history and memory for him; and, in the end, it is like no other. He constructs a 10' x 16' cottage on the ridge overlooking his family's home, and, over the course of a year, his life unfolds, along with the plants, animals, wonderfully eccentric people, and mystery that all live in this ancient and semi-wild area.
Though he loves his solitary walks in the woods, and his quiet nights in the tiny house (which, unlike Thoreau's is packed with books, extra beds for his children, a small organ, and an efficient wood-burning stove) the author is a sociable sort, and he particularly enjoys the company of those who live outside the carefully drawn lines of modern society. He tries to befriend the homeless man who prefers sleeping out of doors, has deep discussions with the almost-mythological 'Green Man' who lives in a cave and feeds himself from what he can hunt and gather; he drops in on eccentric friend Higgins, and Mina and Emil who feed themselves off the land, but adore white sugar. My favorite of his friends is the shy, sad, kind 95-year-old Sanferd Benson, who despite having only left his patch of land twice in his life, is content. He finds his small area of the world constantly engaging and interesting.
Mystical things are always happening in the forest. The author speaks to people convinced they have been face-to-face with fierce Pawtucket Indians, decades after the tribe has died out; his friends find bear scat, though Mitchell knows the last bear (who, in the logic of the place's magical history, may have also been a Pawtucket) died in 1811; Mitchell himself is led by a small fox to a group of deer, from whom he receives a ringing message from the spirit of the land.
He is not a starry-eyed irrational - he is a man who lives in the 20th century, who tries to acccept the new Digital Equipment Corporation building, which sits, green and glowing, not far from his home. However, he prefers to pursue moments of timelessness, where the land's history and the present overlap.
His story of his own experiences on the ridge, in the woods and in the town are interspersed with excerpts from Thoreau's journals, Mitchell's father's journals, written when he spent two years in China in the nineteen-teens, his cousin's careful notations about the birds of Maryland's Eastern Shore. While the book is about living life vividly, on the edge, without so many of the technological screens that divided us from the 'real' world (I use that word, knowing its Post Modern wobbliness), it is also about writing. Specifically, peoples' attempts to describe the world, and to share their experiences in that world. Text often comes up lacking. Thus so often there is a meditation on the relationship between humans and what we generally refer to as 'nature'; and the successes and limitations of putting into words, into text, an experience that exists in time and space, and that in many ways cannot be explained in words.
The book conjures up for me the beauty of a specific place. The soft nights, the damp smell of soil and flowers, walls of green-black trees, the sounds of cicadas, the almost-palpable air. In one of the book's most beautiful passages, he describes the essence of summers with his children:
Whenever I crossed the meadow with my children on summer evenings the year I lived in my cottage, we would select a few stones from the ground and thrown them in front of. . .bats and watch them dive to investigate. Sometimes it would seem to me, standing there in the pale evening while my children tossed stones to the sky, that this was the way the world should be-- a simple life without praise or blame, casting lures to bats on green evenings.
So I came back to New England, and never regretted it for a minute. My life has been far from perfect, and I do not spend as much time appreciating pale, green evenings as I would like. And because I care about this place so much, the changes in the climate that Mitchell was already seeing in the 1990s is particularly grieving. So in some ways it's harder living here because almost every day I feel what the world is losing.
I will always appreciate Mitchell's book for the way it vividly reminded me of the world I missed; and in its incantatory descriptions, I saw the place, and remembered the place, and knew I had to return.