by Laura Smith
Every morning Barbara made her way through the streams of people heading to work and crammed herself onto a subway train headed for Midtown’s looming skyscrapers. She sat at a desk all day. At night, she worked on a new novel called Lost Island about a girl strikingly similar to herself who, trapped in a job she doesn’t like, quits and goes on a sea voyage. Her ship is wrecked and the girl, Jane, lands on an Edenic island with a handsome sailor. Her real life was becoming unbearable to her.
The next summer, Barbara and Helen went on vacation in Vermont. (Sabra, who was seven by then, wasn’t mentioned in letters about this vacation. She was likely at summer camp in Lyme, Connecticut.) Barbara by now was seventeen, and she met a group of Dartmouth students, one of whom, Nickerson Rogers, had just graduated. Nick was strikingly handsome with thick, neatly brushed brown hair and the strong build of a quarterback. His slightly hooded dark eyes gave him an intelligent, thoughtful look, and his interest in the outdoors rivaled Barbara’s. The group drove up to Maine to hike Mount Katahdin. Barbara and Nick hatched a plan with the others to hike the Appalachian Trail. She was thrilled. The trail was a way out of her life in New York.
Back then the Appalachian Trail was barely a trail at all—it consisted of over 2,000 miles of mostly unmarked wilderness from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. A man named Benton MacKaye had proposed its creation in the early 1920s. He had utopian visions about a place that could “transcend the economic scramble” and be a balm on the American psyche after World War I. He thought the trail could lift people out of the drudgery of modern life. Government workers needed a relaxing place to recuperate, he wrote in his proposal. Housewives, he said, could use the trail’s rejuvenating powers too. They could come during their leisure time. It could even be a cure for mental illness, whose sufferers “need acres not medicine.” Civilization was weakening, he said. Americans needed a path forward. The Appalachian Trail was the solution.
There was still so much undeveloped land in the United States. The West had Yosemite and Yellowstone, and many more national parks, but the East Coast was the most populous part of the country, and the people who lived there should have something to rival the western parks. National parks already dotted the East Coast’s landscape, but what if they could be united? MacKaye imagined what Americans would see as they strode the length of the trail: the “Northwoods” pointed firs on Mount Washington, the placid, pine-rimmed lakes of the Adirondacks. They would cross the Delaware Water Gap, the Potomac, and Harpers Ferry. They could follow Daniel Boone’s footsteps through southern Appalachia to the hardwood forests of North Carolina and end at Springer Mountain in Georgia. They would know their country.
Barbara was swept up by the optimism surrounding MacKaye’s trail. She covered her bedroom walls with trail maps and wrote excitedly to friends about her plans, sometimes animatedly telling the same person twice. The trail rekindled the ambitious, pioneering spirit that had been simmering while she sat at her desk in Midtown. Large swaths were undeveloped and not yet trodden. Finding her own way was appealing. She wrote to a friend, “Pitting one’s strength and personality against the wilds—the greatest sort of opportunity on earth.” The trail would harden and refine her. She hoped it would reorient her life.
Two other friends planned to come along. “We’re all slightly rebels against civilization,” Barbara wrote. “We want to go out into the woods and sweat honestly and shiver honestly and satisfy our souls by looking at the mountains, smelling pine trees, and feeling the sky and the earth.” The group met at nearby Bear Mountain to do some preliminary hiking and camping to train for the trip. Knowing she would leave soon made her days at the office drag less. Her life bloomed with possibility. Then the other friends dropped out. Barbara and Nick would go alone.
In July 1932 Barbara quit her job. She walked out of the office for the last time and made her way down the swarming sidewalk, finally free. Her letters from this time are triumphant. She was writing most often to Alice Russell, a thriller writer the Folletts had befriended in Connecticut. She was closer to Barbara’s parents’ age but was one of Barbara’s closest confidantes. “There is always a way out,” she wrote to Alice. “There was even a way out of New York.”
She couldn’t have given up her job at a more inopportune time. New York had a whiff of feral desperation after the stock market crash, and the Depression showed no signs of slowing. A quarter of the U.S. population—nearly thirty million people—was unemployed. Five thousand banks had closed their doors and people had surged in front of the ones that remained open, elbow to elbow, desperate to pull their money out. Beans, noodles, and other cheap foods became staples of the American diet. Meat was done without or saved for Sundays, and whatever scraps were left were thrown into next week’s soup. Women patched clothing and traded with neighbors when their children outgrew them.
The recently completed Empire State Building stood empty on Fifth Avenue, as few could afford the rent; people called it “the Empty State Building.” A mile away from Barbara’s apartment on Riverside Drive, an enormous shantytown was built by the homeless and out of work from scraps of cardboard, crates, and metal. In Lower Manhattan, other shantytowns soon filled the dusty gaps between buildings. Occasionally, the police tried to push people out, but as their numbers grew, the police gave up. At night, the residents covered themselves in old newspapers, trying to keep warm. People waited in lines for hours outside of makeshift kitchens offering watered-down soup. When the soles of their shoes wore out, they lined the insides with cardboard because they couldn’t afford leather. When fuel prices got too high, drivers hitched horses to their automobiles, calling them Hoover wagons in a jab at the president.
If Barbara was nervous about quitting her job, she didn’t mention it in her letters. She had chosen to eschew security in favor of freedom at a time when many were struggling to survive. She would be traveling alone with a man—scandalous behavior at the time. But Barbara was accustomed to doing as she pleased and didn’t put much stock in polite conventions. “I’ve found this out—you can’t arrange your life so that everyone is satisfied, including yourself—unless you are a very uninteresting person,” she wrote to a friend. If her mother disapproved, it was left unsaid, and she wasn’t speaking to her father. When she thought of the future, she tingled with a sense of possibility. There would be woods, sunlight, and fresh air. She would live rough and sleep hard in the cool mountain air. She was awakening while the rest of the world seemed to be cowering.
Barbara and Nick started their journey in Maine. Nick carried a six-pound tent, but often, if the weather held, they unrolled their sleeping bags and slept under the stars. Nick wore shorts, his hiking boots, no shirt, and a red kerchief around his neck. It wasn’t long before he was getting tan and strong. He stopped shaving. As the months passed, his beard reminded her of something out of a Russian novel. “You can’t kill his looks,” Barbara wrote a friend. She wore dungaree pants and a blue shirt. Her muscles became defined again. She felt her body reawakening after her time in the city. Nick cut her hair short and sometimes people on the trail mistook her for a boy, but she didn’t mind. In fact, she seemed to relish it.
In October, they took shelter at the Moosilauke Summit Camp in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. They stayed in the same winter cabin Barbara had once stayed in with her father. Frost feathers—delicate ice formations—spread over the windows. Some were six inches long. They were exquisite, all the more so because they couldn’t last.
Barbara wrote a letter to her father from the winter cabin. She had no idea where he was, so she enclosed it in a letter to Alice. She doubted it would ever reach him and left instructions for Alice to destroy it if he couldn’t be found.
Somewhere along the trail, Barbara and Nick became lovers. Barbara had been dating someone else, a sailor named Anderson, whom she had met during the Caribbean and South Seas voyage. She wrote him a letter breaking it off. She was sorry to have to
do it, especially as Anderson continued to profess his love for her, but he was too often at sea. They hadn’t seen each other in months. She was living a mountain life now and all her energy was focused on Nick. She wrote to her mother, “We haven’t even scrapped at all, which is rather remarkable, considering how constantly and intimately we’ve been together since July. I’ve never had such an enjoyable and satisfactory relation with anyone.”
“God knows I may end up in an awful mess,” she wrote to Alice. “Still, all I can do is follow the best I know—take the greenest and most verdurous trail that I can see. If it ends in a desert or a swamp, maybe I can go back and try another one. And that makes a cosmic adventure of it all.” Life was not something to be handled delicately. Intoxicated by what she had done, she wrote, “I’ve jumped the whole structure of what life was before: I’ve jumped the job, jumped my love, jumped parental dependence, jumped civilization—made a pretty clean break—and am happier than for years and years. I’ve a new, and I think better, structure of life, though time alone can tell that!”
Inviting chaos into your life—quitting your job, leaving your family, breaking up with your boyfriend—can be a clarifying tonic. In a state of upheaval the minor concerns of daily living are summarily dismissed. But it is also terrifying, if you allow yourself to pause and think about it.
The trail was difficult. Since it was uncut, they had to make their way using rough maps and following bends in rivers. Some days the mist was so thick they couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them. They bought a canoe for twenty dollars and paddled across lakes and rivers so choppy that Barbara was surprised the canoe wasn’t smashed to splinters.
She wanted to wear herself out. Before she left for the Appalachian Trail, she wrote, “There will be times when we’ll probably be cold and wet and uncomfortable and grumpy. But we’re ready for that—almost covet it in fact.” She couldn’t climb the Appalachian Trail, she couldn’t write novels, she couldn’t have an epic, adventurous relationship and personal revolutions if she wasn’t willing to sweat.
Barbara and Nick crossed the mossy woods that ran along streams in the Presidential Mountain range. She felt herself transforming. “I’m healthier, browner, stronger, and happier than for years; it is the swellest kind of life: all out of doors, warm and cold, wet and dry, sunshine and moonlight, fir boughs and sleep from sunset till dawn; lakes and rivers and hills, trails and wild country and long white roads.” They swam in lakes and panned for gold. They didn’t seem to mind when they didn’t find any. They didn’t need much and what they did could fit on their backs. The way they were living before seemed so timid and encumbered now. “God! what a lot of junk civilization involves,” Barbara wrote. This was the person she was supposed to be. The life she wanted was coming into view.
As winter approached, the trail got too cold and they decided to end their journey near the Massachusetts border, six hundred miles from where they had started. She returned briefly to her mother’s apartment and then met Nick in Massachusetts.
They hit the road again a couple of weeks later, this time aboard the S.S. Rex heading from New York to Gibraltar. They eventually settled in Mallorca. Barbara learned Spanish and ran hard on the Mediterranean beaches in her bathing suit beside a jet-black wolfhound that belonged to a Spanish soldier. To make money they worked in a pension run by two Englishwomen. Barbara swept rooms, peeled potatoes, and washed dishes while Nick polished shoes, lit fires, chopped wood, and served in the restaurant. Barbara despised the women who ran the pension, but it didn’t matter because she was having such a good time with Nick. At night, they drank muscatel and sherry in cafés and went dancing.
They were “poor as church mice,” as she put it. She still wasn’t speaking to her father. She wrote disparagingly of him but also admitted, “I do want to look him up again sometime.” As for her plans, she had several exciting schemes. “We shall probably establish ourselves in a shack in the woods somewhere and explore from it. I like civilization less and less.” At one point Barbara tried to get a copyediting job at a publishing house in Germany. The future seemed promising and full of action.
For the sake of propriety, they pretended to be married. Nick introduced Barbara with total ease as Mrs. Rogers, which delighted her. The girl who had been so sure that she never wanted to be married was now having quite a lot of fun playing wife. Barbara grew more freckled and Nick loved the little brown spots, calling them “out of doorsy.” He told her she was beautiful, which made her feel beautiful. This was better than marriage—something in between.
To her mother she wrote, “You have no idea how much fun it is to be married. I mean, when you really aren’t.” Helen was divorced and still living with Sabra in New York. Barbara was distancing herself from what she saw as her mother’s mistakes. She was toying with the idea of marriage, dancing around it, trying to fit the pleasurable parts of commitment into her independence and leaving out the baggage. In the same letter, she wrote, “We have agreed that the first requisite of a happy marriage is not to be married.” It was like a Zen koan.
On Saturday, July 7, 1934, when Barbara was twenty, they did get married. Maybe they grew tired of pretending. Or maybe marriage felt like another adventure. There are no letters from this time. They had returned to the United States and settled in Brookline, Massachusetts—no shack in the woods and no publishing job. Nick had a burgeoning interest in photography and eventually got a job with Polaroid as an engineer. Barbara found work as a secretary and continued to work on Lost Island. For the first time, their lives were relatively still.
NINE
During our second winter in New York, P.J. and I moved from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn. We settled into a routine, working reasonable hours, mostly from home—P.J. at one end of our breakfast table, I at the other. Our window overlooked a street where we could see men delivering boxes to the delis, the clothing store, or the pharmacy across the street. Children ran down the sidewalks on their way to and from the primary school around the corner, and construction workers climbed the scaffolding on the church next door. We jogged every other day, usually through Prospect Park. First we would pass the vast Long Meadow, then the baseball fields, then the lake, followed by a stretch of woods, eventually arriving where we had started at Grand Army Plaza. Some days we ran through the park in the opposite direction to change things up. We went out to dinner or bars a few nights a week with friends. Other nights we read or watched movies or TV shows. On Sundays, we picked up the newspaper, and if it was warm enough, we brought coffee to the picnic tables in the little park around the corner from our apartment and read. Everything was in walking distance. Everything was a slight variation on what we had done the week before. Weeks turned into months.
One Sunday, sitting in the little park, I came across an article written by the novelist and city wanderer Teju Cole. He was traveling through Switzerland, photographing the snowy peaks of the mountains and the neat little public squares. He wrote about heimweh, a Swiss German word for homesickness, which, as legend has it, was coined by Swiss mercenaries who “missed home with a deranging intensity, longing for the high elevation of their cantons, their clear lakes, their protective peaks.” Heimweh, Cole explained, had an antonym: fernweh, a longing for far-off places, “is similar to wanderlust but, like heimweh, has a sickish, melancholy tinge.”
I looked around me at the people in the park. They all looked like us. They were thirtysomething couples wearing casual-chic clothes befitting young Brooklyn professionals relaxing on the weekend. Many had French bulldogs or terriers, sleek strollers, or shopping bags. I looked at P.J. reading the paper across from me. I looked at our clothes and matching coffee cups and thought back to the time right after we had returned from Asia. I remembered not wanting to eat in restaurants. It had seemed an expensive way to fill some void that was more than a hunger for food. Every time I started a new movie, bought something, or went out to dinner, I had the sense tha
t these diversions were hollow, that I was just filling the time until the end of something—and that something was my life.
The decisions I made—this or that coffee, this or that movie, this or that dentist—were meaningless, yet my life was packed to the brim with these inconsequential microdecisions that all related to entertaining or taking care of myself. I seemed to live on the surface of the world rather than in it. And perhaps most troublingly of all, dealing with this sensation didn’t feel urgent. I saw the ways in which I could continue like this forever—how, on some level, I might want to.
Part of me wanted to stay in our apartment. Part of me cherished our routine. Part of me found the idea of leaving again, of getting on a plane and going somewhere new frightening. I had traveled all over the world, lived on three continents, and foreign places still conjured the specter of danger: machetes at night, rusty nails, the covetous eyes of thieves, humid hospital rooms with mosquito netting. Part of me preferred our neighborhood and our routine because those things were safe.
But I didn’t like that part of myself. Occasionally, I had a daydream about having a conversation with an elderly me. In the daydream, old me is propped up by pillows on her deathbed, a white comforter draped over her lap. Her hair is long and white, arranged in a bun on the top of her head. She points her gnarled old-lady finger at me. “You weren’t brave enough,” she says with withering finality. “You got one chance, and you blew it.” Her words and dismissive demeanor sting. She is right. I am scared and awfully tempted to pursue only comfort.