Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  There is something stubbornly human about this longing for a paradise on earth (and our need to make a hell out of other, more accessible places), as if our troubles were a product of geography, as if we could escape them if only we left them far behind.

  On a warm Thursday afternoon in March, a year to the day after I had come for my first session, I left the office on the seventh floor of 30 East Sixtieth Street with a big bouquet of yellow roses. A surprising and touching gesture, by which the three women who worked there—Dr. Reichman; Jane Brown, the oncological nurse; and Ana Oliva, the unflappable office manager—marked the ceremonial end of treatment for each of their patients.

  I walked out a little dazed. I don’t think it had occurred to me that I would ever stop coming to New York every three weeks to have a needle placed in my left arm. After the humiliation and fury of radiation had subsided, after the depression began to lift and food no longer tasted like weed killer, after the first pale shaft of hair had given way to a half inch or so of curly softness, the trips to Reichman’s office were no longer filled with the dread of the sickness that was to come. Instead the office had become a safe harbor, a place where everyone understood and no one had to explain. I realized, as I sheltered my roses from the crowds on Madison Avenue, that I would miss the place.

  It was a beautiful day, made giddy by the brilliant cacophonous sunshine—light has a clamorous quality in the city, bouncing off windshields and storefronts and traffic lights, shouting for attention. On impulse, I decided to walk the thirty blocks to the garage where I’d stashed the Jeep, cradling the roses like a piano recitalist who had made it through a particularly intricate bit of Schubert, taking in the city in a way less fettered by memory and experience than it had been in a long time.

  Then I headed north toward—home?

  As the Vermont hills hove into view, a light snow had begun, and the heavy gray sky subdued any lingering sense of ceremony. In my other trips north I had always welcomed the sight of those hills, but now they stirred more ambivalent reactions.

  When I had first started coming to Vermont from New York I loved that moment on Interstate 91 where Massachusetts yielded to Vermont and you knew without looking at any highway sign that you were in a very different place. It was in the light and the air and the blurred outlines of the hills on the horizon, and something in me always lightened. But not this time.

  Like any of life’s great storms, cancer blows a hole through your life. In the aftermath, you pick your way through the debris, salvaging what you can, leaving what you no longer have the room or energy to take. For a short time, you see things remarkably clearly, no longer quite so blinded by your own mythology or the stories you have concocted to make sense of the life you have led.

  What I was beginning to see now was that Vermont was not the place where I could elude the gravitational pull of lifelong worries and regrets, a paradise of simple living. Those starry visions had died quick enough and I’d ended up in a swamp of my own making. Cancer eliminated that swamp of grief and loss and animated gophers, for which I was very grateful. More than that, it had given me something I hadn’t bargained on: it gave me back myself. Not the one I had moved to Vermont to become, the recluse who needed no one, nor the one I left in New York, that wretched failure, but someone else both familiar and unfamiliar, gawky and barely recognizable—the self that lies beneath the roles we all accrete as we go along, layer upon layer—good girl, bad girl rebel, failure, success, and exile, all of them. The self I had fought so hard to save was none of these things, not the writer or the mother or the woman who didn’t know what mulch was. It was a being that simply wanted to continue to be. That was it.

  That self—an identity so bedrock it didn’t even have a gender—would disappear again, the moss and lichen of illusion and delusion, regret and longing, would grow over it, and the harping voices drawing attention to my many inadequacies and faults would gradually drown out its voice. But until that time, I realized on the trip back north, I had a window, a small and rapidly closing one, in which I could do anything I wanted. And as I turned up the icy mess that was my road in mud season, I knew what that one thing was.

  I wanted to walk in the woods.

  A month later, I was driving through flat, windswept country on the New York side of Lake Champlain, to the six-hundred-acre Wilderness Survival Center.

  I had met Marty Simon, the director of the center, at a weekend retreat sponsored by the Vermont Organization of Wilderness Guides (VOGA), a group that aims to give women a sampler of outdoor skills and experiences. The Doe Camps, as they’re somewhat unfortunately called (somehow the image of skittish brown-eyed ungulates doesn’t convey competence), provide a crackerjack group of specialists who will teach you how to cook a moose, bring down a wild turkey with a twenty-gauge shotgun, wrangle an ATV, catch a trout with a fly rod, identify edible plants in the woods, and use a chain saw, among dozens of other skills.

  Most of the clinics provided tart servings of humility to this participant—the only thing I was able to hook during the fly-fishing lessons was my own coat—but the instructors were nothing if not patient and the women attending were a hoot. It was a variegated crowd from all over the state. There were a few ringers—women whose older brothers had taught them how to do a lot of this stuff when they were kids and were just brushing up their skills and enjoying the camaraderie—but most of us were members of the virgin incompetent, eager to learn but a bit intimidated by a world that seemed so adamantly male.

  There were women who wanted to get back their inner tomboys, and women who wanted to understand what sent their husbands out before dawn to wander around in the cold and the damp all day during hunting season. And there were a few women for whom the woods were an exotic place, but not perhaps as exotic as their ordinary lives must have seemed to the broad majority of those with whom they were sharing moose barbecue—like LaWanda, a young woman who worked nights as a nurse’s aide in an assisted-living home, raised three children during the day, and had once been on the receiving end of a bullet in a Newark housing project.

  The course I had been most interested in was a two-day seminar in wilderness survival, taught by a gravel-voiced, balding, mustachioed Vietnam vet with the stoic eyes of a basset hound, who tossed out jokes, advice, anecdotes, and patter with the aplomb of a stand-up comedian working the small-town nightclub circuit.

  Marty Simon understood women—he didn’t condescend to them by dumbing down what he had to teach or by treating them as rarefied beings who couldn’t take a joke. He disarmed through provocation, making outrageous, non-PC comments about marriage and women, most of them directed at his wife, Aggie, who sat at the back with their two dogs, and with whom Marty locked eyes with such frank admiration that he immediately inspired trust.

  In my first few months in Vermont, I had surfed the Internet in search of a course or a Web site that would teach me what I wanted to know, and was inevitably sidetracked into reading countless tales of what had happened to those who went into the woods without these skills. None of it was of much help—there was a not-so-subtle machismo running through most of these tales, a tone of “here we are being manly men, look at the risks we take,” that made me want to get back to a long-neglected needlepoint tucked away in the linen closet.

  The same mixture of arcane knowledge and pumped-up posturing informed most of the Web sites offering instruction, and the choices were bewildering. The orienteering schools offered to teach you how to use a map and compass in about fifteen minutes before sending you off with a timer to compete in a race to find your way to some hidden cache before anyone else did. It was the woods on Ritalin. Then there were the camps for survivalists that taught you how to field-dress an elk so you would have something to eat after civilization had ended, and on the other end of the spectrum, the quasi-mystic types who had learned their craft from Native American spirit guides only they could see. It was during those online expeditions that I had first run across VOGA’s women-onl
y weekends, which sounded a good deal less overwhelming.

  Marty started us out in the classroom and then, an hour later, we took to the woods. We learned about fire making—never walk in the woods, Marty said, without a bit of cotton steeped in Vaseline and a flint; together they would spark a fire even in damp tinder. We also learned how to start a fire with a stake whittled from a tree, a bow made from a bit of twine (another backpack necessity), and a supple branch. The process was difficult and well-nigh interminable, but it worked. He showed us the flat, dry high ground free of roots and protected from falling branches that offered the best places to build an emergency shelter for the night, and the places not to, where the dew would seep through your clothes and insects would drive you nuts. He introduced us to unassuming little bits of greenery that turned out to be rich sources of nutrition growing right under our noses, pointing out delicate leaf patterns that grew from white carrot-shaped roots that tasted like cucumbers. Pretty soon we were all wandering around looking for choice spots to spend the night, pulling up miniature albino root vegetables, and choosing the best branches for insulating ourselves, with the enthusiasm of young married couples looking for a new home.

  Most if not all of us would have little use for this information in our daily lives, and at first it all seemed a bit Boy Scout. But then I got it. Marty had not only made these archaic exercises fun, but he was also minute by minute instilling confidence that would stand us in good stead in any situation in which we found ourselves. Marty made competence a joy in and of itself, tying it to a way of seeing the world that was dazzling in its practicality. That was when I decided he might be the one who could teach me direction.

  At the end of Marty’s course, I purchased my very own sparking flint, mostly for the sheer elegance of the smooth, dark gray cigarette-shaped bit of metal. Then I hung around until all the other women had left. As he was packing up, I asked Marty a little nervously if he would consider giving me private navigation lessons. He was wary, especially after I told him I would probably want to write about the experience. He had a very low opinion of the press, and besides, he was too busy, he said, but in the end he gruffly agreed to let me write to him and give him a better idea of what I hoped to learn and why I wanted to learn it from him.

  I didn’t write the letter for a long time. I was afraid, that was the long and short of it, though I didn’t admit that to myself at the time. Afraid of failure, of exposing my incompetence to a stranger, no matter how understanding he seemed. And afraid of something else, something I couldn’t admit to. Or couldn’t before I had cancer. It turns out that after you have stared out a window and seen a bespectacled egg where your vanity used to be, you are ready to admit to pretty much anything.

  And what I admitted to myself when I got back to Vermont and put the yellow roses in water was how very much I had always resisted a sense of direction, how hard I fought to go the wrong way, even in the simplest of situations, even when listening to an automated voice telling me to go left on a one-way street. (Wrong street. Had to be.)

  Part of it was fear of any information presented arithmetically or for that matter spatially, as well as the anxiety of getting it wrong, of failing the test a map represented. And part of it was the eternal bliss ninny aspect of my soul that always seemed to prefer magical thinking to reality. But the reluctance went deeper than that, went to the heart of what it meant to take responsibility. I could take responsibility for others—my daughter, my husband, my friends. But to take responsibility for myself was alarming, in a way I hadn’t understood until cancer forced a reckoning.

  I understood it now. And while I still suspected that my fears about finding my way might be too deeply ingrained and intractably neurotic to reform, I wrote a letter to Marty.

  Marty agreed to put me through a two-day course, instructing me in the basics of what is technically known as land navigation. In his reply, he assured me that anybody could learn how to find their way, and it was that offhand assurance that I clung to. But I had my doubts.

  By the time I met up with Marty it was late spring. I got lost, of course. Despite Marty’s careful instructions, I had turned to my cell phone in a moment of uncertainty, and the phone had led me to a road taken out by a gully washer two years earlier. Marty wasn’t surprised when I finally lumbered into view of the rough shed in which he teaches the classroom portion of his courses. It’s why he doesn’t include GPS in his instruction. People won’t follow their own eyes anymore, he said. They’re so dependent on technology they can’t do anything for themselves.

  We tried to get right to work, but the drumming rain on the metal roof over the shed had us yelling to be heard, and we retreated to the house, where Aggie made us tea.

  We sat in the kitchen, waiting for the weather to lift.

  Marty had mentioned something at Doe Camp about the importance of being prepared at all times for just about anything, so we talked about what he took with him when leaving the house. It was a pretty impressive list: three knives, including a Bark River all-purpose camping knife handmade to his specifications, a Bravo Necker 2 that he wore on a lanyard under his shirt, and a smaller model in a sheath at his ankle, just in case. In case of what, wasn’t clear, but I wouldn’t want to be the terrorist chihuahua that crossed his path.

  The knives were just the beginning: there were also a standard compass, a wrist compass, and a .357 Smith & Wesson stainless steel five-shot revolver, which he was licensed to carry concealed in forty-one states—he was working on the remaining nine. In addition he wouldn’t even go to Walmart without a lightweight compressible thermal body bag that folded up to the size of a pocket handkerchief, and of course a sparking flint and a small tube of cotton soaked in petroleum jelly.

  All of which makes sense if you believed, as Marty did, that the end of freedom as we knew it was close at hand, that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the like were in league with the anti-Christ, that there wasn’t much difference left between us and North Korea, and that any sane man or woman had a ten-year supply of canned goods and dried meats stored in his or her home or bunker for the coming apocalypse.

  It would have been easy to dismiss Marty Simon as a cartoon version of a right-wing gun nut. The reason I didn’t was Marty himself. There was a kindness about the man, a sense of integrity and character that prevented such easy facile stereotyping. I would trust Marty Simon with my life, I remember thinking. A grand statement that usually means nothing, and maybe it occurred to me because at that time I was myself in survivalist mode from the whole cancer ordeal. But something about the man made me think about the number of people I knew about whom I could make that statement. The list was extremely short.

  The rain began to let up, reminding Marty of why I was there, and we got down to business. People got lost, Marty said, out of a combination of ignorance and arrogance. They don’t prepare, they don’t look at a map and plot a route, they don’t know how far they’re capable of walking in a given amount of time and at what pace. They don’t bring what they need in case something goes wrong, and they don’t pay attention: to the landscape, to the way in front of them and the path behind. And in the end, they lose control, shutting down the very parts of their brain that they need to survive. You’ve got to know you, he said. I can’t tell you that often enough. And he couldn’t, though it would take a long time for me to understand what he meant by it.

  Marty divided his classroom instruction into map and compass, first individually, then in combination, before heading out to put them to practical use in the field. With great deliberation he pulled out a deeply creased topographical map of the area in which the Wilderness Survival Center was located, smoothed it out on the kitchen table, giving me one of his sidelong glances that took in the anxiety and fear of failure that must have been radiating from my side of the kitchen table. I could see the thought this might take a while crossing his face.

  He was right. When I thought about maps, to the extent that I did, it was usually from two very
different approaches. The first was simple intimidation—I had never been able to read even the simplest of maps, and my incompetence baffled me. At the same time, I loved maps, the very idea of them, the supreme audacity of what this two-dimensional rendering of the world was aiming to accomplish.

  Look at a map and logic blooms, orderly and incontrovertible. There is the world rendered submissive to reason, destinations linear, alternatives manifest. North is up and south is down, east to the right and west to the left. Maps present a comforting vision of the world, reducing infinite distances to a grid composed of precisely drawn horizontal and vertical lines, tethering treacherous winds to a four-pointed star. There is no arguing with a map. Yes, you can get there from here, the map proclaims, and this is the path you must take.

  But a map begins as a trick of the eye, a sleight of hand, the round rumpled sphere of the earth made flat and smooth and fitted to a rectangular piece of paper. Already you are in the land of the counterintuitive, and in fact everything about direction speaks to this ineffably human quality of trying to impress a logical sense of order on a chaotic and shifting world. Even the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, west—began as an act of hubris, defined not by the contours of the world itself but by those of the human body: anthropologists believe the first directions were simply up and down, back and front.

  There were maps before there was writing, scratched on cave walls, on papyrus and parchment, and from the beginning they have represented more than a simple picture of where things are in relation to one another; the earliest maps pointed the way to paradise. They are works of both poetry and prose, metaphor and explication, of wild imagination and narrowest calculation, a place where faith and reason both collide and coexist, a tracing—in the eyes of Gerardus Mercator, the Renaissance cartographer—of the hand of God.

  I don’t remember how much of this I tried to impart to Marty in a desperate attempt to conceal my inability to understand what he was talking about, but I knew I was in pretty deep when I found myself telling him about how you should never walk widdershins around a church, because by going counterclockwise, or opposite to the sun, people thought they might enter the land of the fairies.