Beyond the house the world grew somber as winter advanced. Inside it was warm and softly lit with the golden glow of the oil lamps. Over the stove I hung bunches of herbs I had grown that summer in the garden. I put flannel sheets on the beds, unpacked wool blankets, split wood by day, and listened to the high bark of passing wild geese by night. I imagined that I could give away all my money and live happily on nothing, and I began to suspect, as I had all along, that this Henry Thoreau, for all his nasty griping at the world of human affairs, was right.
By November the pattern of my life in the cottage had changed because of the onset of cold weather. Every morning I would shake down the stove, make coffee, bank the fire, and then sit and read or write by the stove for a while before leaving for work. When I returned at night I would stoke the fire again before dinner. Frequently I would not bother with the tiresome work of lighting the lamps and would sit there by the glow of the coals waiting for the log to catch, listening to the warm crack of the growing fire. Occasionally, on very cold days when the fire had burned low, I would pour myself a glass of Russian vodka and drink it neat to take the chill off. Hardly a serious drinker, I would sometimes emerge into the sharp autumnal night gloriously drunk, either with the vodka or with the beauty of the cold autumn sky. My mentor would have been appalled by this custom, but then poor old Henry—never to taste the sharp fire, and never to have known the glory of hot tea or coffee.
I would eat dinner with my children and then return to the cottage with one or both for the night. After they went to sleep in the loft, I would stay up reading my various journals. And in this manner, day by day, during the week I would lead the quiet, small life of a peaceful student of the world.
On weekends I would desert my spartan existence and go out to restaurants or concerts or the ballet in Boston or Cambridge, only to return through the dark rural landscape to the black sky of the ridge. That winter I rekindled an interest in music, lectures, drama, and opera, which I had enjoyed in the years when I lived in New York, and it seemed to me that I was somehow slipping backward toward youth instead of growing old and complacent as we are supposed to.
In spite of—or maybe because of—my primitive living conditions, I considered myself well-off. Sometimes at night, returning from Boston, with the temperature dipping well below the freezing mark, I would see the glow of Rudolph’s fire in the island of woods by the exit ramp of the highway. On other days I would spot him plodding along, his head bowed against the wind. Once I saw him resting in the sun on the steps of the hardware store in the town. I tried again to strike up a conversation.
“Cops get you the other night?” I asked. I had seen a police cruiser parked near his campsite.
“Just the state boys,” he muttered. “Curious sons of bitches.”
He looked away to avoid further discussion, and I moved on. Rudolph was known to the local police. The winter before on bitterly cold nights they had been in the habit of stopping by his camp to see if he would prefer to spend the night in jail, where it was warm. “No thanks,” he would reply. “Too hot.”
“Well, good luck,” I said, and walked on, not wishing to intrude on his thoughts.
I saw my friend Emil at the hardware store that month. He was dressed, as always, in baggy corduroys, a heavy sweater, and sandals over thick wool socks.
“But we never see you anymore,” he said, shaking my hand, as he always did, even if we had seen each other the day before.
“Work,” I said. “I’ve built this cottage on my land. You should come and see it.”
“Yes, yes, but we must take a walk in the woods this month. It is not too late. The oaks have held their leaves.” Emil was from Austria and spoke a beautiful English that he had learned in Britain in the 1930s. He and his sister, Minna, lived in a small house they had built in a clearing just south of the lake on the other side of the ridge. They grew most of their food; they had extensive vegetable and herb gardens, a small herd of goats, a flock of chickens, and hives of bees, and they collected most of the fuel for cooking and heating from their own carefully maintained wood lot, a marvel of forest management, with neatly trimmed hardwoods and not a hint of brush or deadwood on the forest floor. I had met them through Higgins, who made a point of knowing all the interesting or eccentric people within a fifty-mile radius. When I first moved to the area, he and I would walk through the woods to Minna and Emil’s on Sunday afternoons to talk and drink their homemade wine.
Every time I would see Emil or Minna, we would plan a walk or a canoe trip on one of the local rivers. Somehow, though, these expeditions never seemed to develop. They were always too busy with one or another of their various homesteading projects.
“Higgins and I will come over this Sunday, perhaps,” I said. “We can talk and make plans.”
Higgins and I showed up as promised on Sunday afternoon, a clear, brilliant November day with oak leaves hanging in little clusters throughout the forest.
This was the first time I had been to Emil’s since I built my cottage, and seeing the place again, I realized the influence this house had had on my building notions. It was small, maybe 1,400 square feet, with gable ends built from local granite and a long row of salvaged windows crossing the south side. It was of heavy post-and-beam construction, with a single, large downstairs room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. A ladder on the north face led up to the second floor, where the family had their bedrooms. There was a handsome enamel wood stove in the center of the downstairs room and next to it, near the alcove that served as the kitchen, a long wooden table. Emil and Minna greeted Higgins and me effusively, as they always did. I don’t believe they had many visitors. In fact, I think Higgins and I were almost their only friends. Minna had three grown children, one or two of whom were often visiting, and sometimes when we went there the whole family would gather at the door to shake our hands or embrace and kiss us repeatedly. On this day, however, Emil and Minna were alone, and after the requisite number of handshakes, kisses, and embraces, we settled down to discuss life. Emil seated us at the long table and took out a bottle of homemade May wine from an oak cabinet. Minna set out glasses, placing one in front of each of us. Emil poured the wine, catching the drips with a white dish towel as he topped off the glasses.
“Drink,” he said, “to November and the harvest home.”
“To November,” we chanted.
I knew Emil better than any of the others in the family since he was the one I would most often encounter away from their house—he was the official errand runner, and often he would walk on the ridge looking for mushrooms. Whenever I saw him we would talk for nearly an hour, even though he would announce every five minutes or so that he had to move on. Over the years, through these various bits of conversation, I had pieced together his story.
The family had lived a fairly substantial middle-class life in Vienna in the 1930s. Emil was a set designer; Minna was married and starting a family. Minna’s husband, who was a Jew, went underground and disappeared after the Nazis took over. Emil joined an antifascist group, and early on in the war was captured and sent to a prison camp in Czechoslovakia, where he worked in the mines as a slave laborer. He lived on ersatz coffee, bread made mostly with sawdust, and soup consisting of water in which the greens and vegetables for the guards had been cooked. After some months in the mines he managed to get an office job. He was good at languages and he was friendly and persuasive—he told me once he even came to like his prison-camp boss and had actually visited him in Berlin after the war.
The office job gave Emil access to a typewriter, paper, and forms, with which he forged, probably with his boss’s knowledge, a weekend pass. He got in the habit of leaving the camp early on Saturday morning to walk in the villages and mountains, and soon began staying out all night when the weather was warm, and sometimes even when it wasn’t. He began to live off the land. He learned all the edible wild plants in the mountains and would graze the slopes like a goat. Mushrooms were abundant i
n autumn; he would eat greens in spring, tubers and roots in summer and fall. In winter he would make tea with twigs or pine tips, or beg food from local cafes and farmhouses. He fashioned a pair of skis so he could travel through the mountains in the winter. One day, he told me, he ascended higher than usual, crossed a valley he had not seen before, and came to a small house in a high pasture in a district different from the one in which the prison camp was located. He knocked on the door, thinking to ask for a bowl of milk. A woman about his age opened the door, realized he was a prisoner, and told him she had nothing to give. He recognized her as a German, and made it clear that he was on some official mission and was headed back to his camp. As he was leaving, she nodded him inside and then fed him a full meal of meat, potatoes, and turnips. He ate in silence and left.
“Not a word of this, you understand?” she said to him as he went out the door. “But come back. I will feed you.”
He visited her the next weekend, and the next, and throughout that winter, eating better and better each time. She explained later that she was the wife of a German officer who had been sent to the Russian front. She had not heard from him since early October. Emil related all this to me, without a wink, without any suggestion that there had been anything sexual between them, only this weekly exchange of food. In prison, he said, nourishment was his consuming passion.
“So, is this a good year for you?” Higgins asked.
“Not bad at all,” Emil said. “Rain for all of April, of course, as always here. We are low here, Higgins, as you know; this is bottom land, near the lake. So we raise the beds—then we are dry, eh? Not bad, Higgins.”
“Not bad at all; we are having good greens this year,” Minna said. “Except for these dogs; they are taking chickens. I have seen this one, very ugly, like a police dog, but terrified if it sees you.”
“We are going to have to do something,” Emil said.
“We don’t like to do it,” Minna said. “But he is eating three, maybe four hens now.”
“What will you do? Kill it?” I asked.
They seemed embarrassed by this and merely nodded sadly and changed the subject.
“I’ve seen a weird dog,” I said. “An immense thing with shaggy fur and a round back. No interest in people, though, and it is very fast.”
“Big?” Minna asked.
“Yes; black, I think.”
“I’ve seen this fellow in the woods. He must belong to the farm. But he’s not a bad sort, I don’t think—too lazy. It’s this police dog we dislike.”
Minna was looking better than I remembered. She seemed to have fleshed out a little, and she had let her hair grow. Unlike Emil, who still dressed like a European, she always wore American jeans and flannel shirts. So did her three children. The two sons were living in Amherst, and her daughter, Ursula, was in Boston, but they would come back regularly to help with the goats or to collect the honey from the hives. In spite of earlier deprivation the family was very healthy; they lived well on what little money Emil earned by teaching languages and set design. The one anomaly in their healthy lives, other than a taste for homemade wine and strong coffee, was an addiction to white sugar. Emil would heap spoonfuls of it into his coffee, and they kept a great silver bowl in the middle of the table mounded with white granules, which rose like a snowy mountain above the edges of the bowl.
One of their favorite subjects was their own way of life. Higgins was a fellow traveler of theirs; of all the people in the community, he and Jane were most like Emil and Minna. Nevertheless Emil seemed to think Higgins needed conversion, and whenever we were there the whole family would launch into praises of the good life, for Higgins’ sake.
“You see this, Higgins?” Minna would say, waving her arm back toward the kitchen alcove, with its braids of onions and garlic and its shelves of homemade preserves. “All this we grow.”
“You drink this wine, Higgins? You drink summer light. This is good.”
“I understand,” Higgins would say.
They would interrupt before he could continue.
“This is the good life, Higgins. We go into the forest and we cut our fuel. We go to the hen house, and every morning—new eggs. This earth grows for you.”
“The good bounty, Higgins,” Minna said.
“The good earth,” Emil echoed.
Ironically, considering the abuse they had taken at the hands of Germans, they loved Wagnerian opera. Sometimes they would make us listen with them in silence while they played us their favorite passages. That day they wanted us to hear something from Tristan und Isolde. Emil rose, put a record on the stereo, returned to the table, and sat down, nodding his head contemplatively, waiting for the passage he wanted us to hear. Minna had closed her eyes.
“Now, hear this,” Emil said. One of the leitmotifs emerged from the dark music, barely perceptible unless you knew what to listen for. They closed their eyes and listened, quiet for once, occasionally lifting their hands at significant passages or even toasting silently with their wine glasses, and waving their heads slowly to the flow of the music.
“Beautiful, is it not, Higgins?” Emil said after the piece was over. “How can you deny that this is the pinnacle of human endeavor?”
Higgins did not like opera and they knew it.
They put the leitmotif on again.
Higgins rolled his eyes at me, but I was enjoying the moment. They had left the front door open, and the fresh air of November was spilling into the room. At one point a little flock of sparrows flitted past the open door, feeding on the tomato vines that still clung to the wall of the house.
“To Richard Wagner,” Emil said, lifting his glass.
“To Wagner,” I repeated.
We drained our glasses.
They launched into another litany of things that were good and also free. These litanies often began with a toast, but would soon assume a life of their own.
“Sun,” they said. “The sun is free.”
“Fresh air.”
“The sky.”
“Rain.”
“Soil.”
“Birds. Bird song is free.”
“Love of nature.”
“Wagner,” I said, joining the praises.
“Yes, yes, Wagner is free,” Minna said.
“Not really,” Higgins said. “You have to be rich to hear Wagner. You have to pay to go to the opera. You have to pay for the stereo or the electricity.”
“Well, Wagner should be free. It is the fault of the state. It is the problem with this world,” Minna said. “You can’t have good things by the state. Only the bad. The guns and the bombs.”
“But here we live without the state,” Emil said. “Minimal at least. We do not see police here.” He winked at me.
“Here is only the gardens and the chickens, and the wind at night,” said Minna. “This is free, Higgins. The wind—no state can control it.”
“Do you vote?” I asked.
“Yes, we vote,” Minna said. “But after that, what? You get the same. Maybe that is a good thing. But always we are working in spite of the state.”
Minna was part of a peace group that for years used to hold a vigil every Saturday morning on the town common. It was her one social activity.
“This is here the minimal state,” she said. “I go to the common every Saturday to say to the world that this is the minimal state. That you can stand outside with others and say that the state is not good. Higgins, I have seen the state at its worst. No one in this world has seen the state as I have. It is a thin line, this government.”
“So we stay here,” Emil said. “We stay here and grow vegetables and keep to ourselves.”
“But next time we will fight,” Minna said.
“Or retire farther to wilderness. We are old.”
“No, I will fight,” Minna said.
“I will fight, too,” Higgins said, standing up.
“Someday, Emil, you and Minna should come down with me to Walden Pond to visit the site where Hen
ry Thoreau once lived. He went to jail to protest an immoral war.”
“To Henry Thoreau, man of peace,” Higgins said.
“I drink,” Emil said. Even though they were among the most Thoreauvian individuals I knew, they did not know much about Henry.
“To Henry,” I said.
“To life without the state,” Minna said.
The May wine was beginning to assert itself. We toasted the good life again. Emil toasted the soil. We toasted autumn, and the harvest, and world peace, and when we finally rose to go, they clustered around us at the door. We shook hands heartily, we embraced, we kissed. We shook hands again, and then Higgins and I wandered up the hill away from the house, their farewells still echoing through the darkening November woods.
I went up to Walden Pond more often than usual that autumn. I was reading Henry’s journals for November, and I got into the habit of visiting some places he mentioned to see what changes had occurred. In spite of the controversy in our time over the use of the pond, it was one of the places that had changed the least, and it was particularly pleasant in autumn. The summer crowds were gone, the winter ice fishermen had yet to arrive, and I was alone with the walkers and the few tourists who would come to see the pond. I would wander down to Thoreau’s cabin site on the northwest side of Walden, far from the road, and whenever I spent any length of time there I would almost always meet other pilgrims.
Once I saw a man in a maroon robe making his way through the forest with a little group of people around him. He turned out to be an eminent Tibetan monk, a student of Thoreau, who was visiting New York and had made a pilgrimage to Concord to visit the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Another day that November I met at the cabin site a well-dressed man of about forty who was a lawyer from New York City; he looked very tired. He and I fell into conversation, as often happened when I met visitors at the site, and he explained that twice a year, sometimes more often, he would come to this spot to put the world in perspective.
Living at the End of Time Page 10