It had been well over an hour since I’d set out from the house, venturing one after another breaks in the field, enough that I started to wonder whether I was actually walking in circles, trying one path and then not realizing I was returning, each time, to that very same path again. I was still committed to locating the cabin but beginning to wonder if that commitment should also include going back to the house and asking for clearer directions.
I paused for a moment and looked out, over the marshy landscape in front of me; some of the tree trunks were flooded in ankle-deep water, others in knee-deep. Beyond the water, the woods broke steeply upward. Suddenly there was something I hadn’t seen in view before: a piece of bare wood. I moved slightly to see if I could get a better view of what that wood was connected to. Visible only from a single angle, far from where I’d started, was a glint of red: bright, almost unmistakable, the color of maple leaves in fall, of cherries straight off the stem.
Though I was tired and covered in mud well past my ankles, I felt a sudden surge of energy when I saw that flash of red. As I pushed some brush aside and moved closer, I could see it through the trees: a faded “W” painted on the side of an old shack, probably an outbuilding, maybe belonging to Wittgenstein himself. The shack, aged and missing several boards, was tucked behind a small crop of trees, trees that had hidden it from sight. Even the “W” was partially gone; its thick and crooked lines were missing several strips of red. At least it was clear, however, that I was finally on the right track.
My shoes and pants already soaked through, I decided to make a run for it, straight through the high grasses and the water. I plunged one foot and then the other into the dirty water in front of me and bolted toward the red mark. As my feet sloshed through the water, I kept my eye firmly on the red mark, never letting it out my sight, until I found myself closer and closer to it.
When I finally reached the decrepit wooden building with the “W” painted on its side, I stopped, caught my breath, and looked behind me; there was no path from the tractor trail to here, just marshy water and mountains and woods in the distance; obviously no one had visited Wittgenstein’s land in months.
After his first year in Skjolden, Wittgenstein left Norway. He returned to the cabin several times, but he never seemed to stay there for more than a few months. He tried teaching school in rural Austria; working in a hospital, as a shipman, and in the Austro-Hungarian army as a soldier during the war; and even returning to the university in Cambridge. All the while, he lived in Norway intermittently, seeking to make sense of the poor reception of his ideas on language, even by some of his friends and colleagues.
In 1926 Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl commissioned architect Paul Engelmann to build her a townhouse in Vienna, but then, in an effort to stave off his recurring depression and to give him something useful to do with his time, she asked Wittgenstein to oversee the project, helping out where needed.
Wittgenstein was a tyrant, the project becoming an obsession: he wanted not only to build a house but also to create art, art that took into account systems and models of logic. The house could be, it seemed, a microcosm of the philosopher’s aesthetic, challenging contemporary structures of belief throughout Vienna, a study in contrasts beside the city’s ornamental artistic style and dense, tree-lined streets.
The builders and workers couldn’t stand Wittgenstein; even his longtime friend Engelmann eventually turned over his plans to let Wittgenstein finish the house how he wanted. When the house was nearly done, Wittgenstein demanded the ceilings be raised thirty millimeters so they were the exact proportions he had called for. Instead of curtains, he installed sheets of metal that raised and lowered from the floor on a pulley. The house was stark and white, a series of three adjoining blocks, which Wittgenstein himself would later describe as “cold.” In the end, Gretl would decide not to live there.
Some people said, even then, that the house reflected a change in Wittgenstein’s philosophical beliefs: a midpoint, as one scholar put it, “a hinge.” The cabin was different; it was simpler, more idyllic: the place Wittgenstein always said he’d settle, though he never quite could.
It took weeks to clear the guesthouse basement floor even though I threw myself into the project, so exhausted at the end of each work day I hardly wanted to walk around town or cook or swim or play soccer with the local kids.
The original plan had been to take one day and jackhammer the entire cement floor into smaller pieces of rock. The second day, Darrell, other friends, and I would shovel that rock into wheelbarrows that we would take outside and dump into the thirteen-hundred-meter-deep fjord. On the third day, we’d clean everything up and begin pouring cement for the new, lower floor. As it turned out, the jackhammering took several days and the pieces of rock needed to be cleared continually. It was heavy lifting; the work was slow and dark and loud: jackhammer a small area, chisel the cement in that section farther, by hand, then load the larger pieces of rock into the wheelbarrow, walk all the way out to the fjord, dump the wheelbarrow, and repeat the process.
Once the whole floor was jackhammered, the foundation was a mess of uneven rubble and pieces of white rock, so fine we had to use brooms and dustpans, not shovels, to load the piles into wheelbarrows to take outside. For hours, I swept rocks into dustpans and then listened to those same tiny rocks clank as I emptied each dustpan-full into white two-gallon buckets or the wheelbarrow, if someone else wasn’t using it.
A thin layer of dust covered everything in the house: the furniture, the walls, the fixtures, our clothes. Even when someone finally thought to shut the basement door, the dust came in through the cracks in the doorposts and the window frames and the slats in the floor. When I thought about that summer in the guesthouse, some months later, that’s what I remembered most: how that layer of white attached to everything; as much as we cleaned, we couldn’t get rid of it. Even when the basement was done—leveled out, new cement poured and polished—a concrete fog still hung in the air, never quite falling, suspended for days.
However much time and energy it took, the work still made sense to me. While I lived in Chicago, I had stumbled into a part-time job of fixing up old houses: tiling, painting, sealing concrete, hanging lights, and refinishing floors. Though I didn’t have any construction training or background, I liked working with my hands and the challenge of figuring out problems in real space and time.
The first room I ever painted was at the house of a professor, Anna. The house was a hundred-year-old Victorian, brick and sprawling. That first day, when I walked inside, the rooms were dark and the wood subfloors were bare, with oriental rugs thrown over sections of dried carpet glue and nails. One bathroom was pink, countertops and all; the other had lime-green, plastic-tiled walls and ceiling. The dining room that I was hired to paint had walls that were two different tones of mustard, divided by a chair rail, and a dingy off-white wooden ceiling. By the time I had finished painting, later that first afternoon, the room was a soft, almost flaxen yellow, and the trim and the ceiling were such a bright white that the room looked like it might lift off from the rest of the house.
After Anna’s house came an offer for painting from one of her friends and then from someone else at the college. Soon one of my coworkers from my part-time tutoring job asked if I’d consider helping her redo the shingle siding on her garage. After that job, someone else asked if I knew—or could figure out—how to take out old carpets and install baseboard and trim.
When I wasn’t fixing up old houses, I was thinking about them: paint colors that would look better on the walls, carpet that needed to be stretched, what I would do with the siding or the front porch if I were the owner. Sometimes I fixed things the owners didn’t know were broken: a leaky faucet or a crack in the plaster. From my own white-walled rental apartment, I searched real estate listings for houses I could never buy, made plans for their renovation on napkins and spare corners of paper. I even fixated on the guesthouse, my imagined endings for its various rooms seamless, e
asy.
After that first red “W” on the side of the shack, I began regularly seeing small red o’s—like bull’s-eyes—painted on trees lining the overgrown trail in front of me. I followed the bull’s-eyes up for some time, through the thick brush-covered woods that opened onto the lake, only once missing a bull’s-eye and ending up at a sheer stone wall, but I backtracked and soon was again on the trail of rocks beside high evergreen trees along the ridge.
The red markers began to come closer together as I continued along the trail. I hurried from one marked tree to the next as fast as my feet could move. I sprang over mossy rocks and through a wall of dangling evergreens, past streaks of light breaking through the dark needles and onto the low mountain trail. I walked through more than one spiderweb and rapped my legs and arms continually to try to beat the mosquitoes and flies. It wasn’t long, though; perhaps a mere fifteen or twenty minutes after the “W” on that shack, I clambered up a last rocky hill and, finally, was at the top of the trail.
In the small clearing up there, the air was sharp and warm. To one side was a steep drop-off to the lake; on the other was dense forest. In the middle of that clearing, in the place where all the photographs and maps had shown a cabin—roof neatly tiled, with white trimmed windows, the thing Wittgenstein had built—there was a rock foundation surrounded by trees. It was low and square, a few makeshift steps leading down, then a layer of leveled-off, unevenly spaced rocks, a meter or so high with a small rectangular hole in the center, probably a root cellar. Much of the foundation was covered in moss, and grasses and small plants were beginning to overtake the rocks. A single tree—a story high—rose up out of the cellar.
I turned around and looked back, wondering if I was at another relic of an outbuilding, if I had missed a bend in the trail or needed to continue on ahead. Then I saw it, lying across one corner of the foundation: a small Austrian flag, red-and-white striped with a faded wooden pole. I was at the end of the trail, but the cabin was gone.
In the mid-1930s Wittgenstein began to recant his early Tractatus philosophy on language, describing it as “overly narrow” and “lacking context.” In his early years Wittgenstein hadn’t accounted for multiple meanings of words and for the way, whatever our context is, we try to make word meanings appropriate to it: languages. Talking about language without recognizing context, Wittgenstein said, was like “trying to walk on frictionless ice.” We must, he urged readers, return to the “rough ground of ordinary language, language in use.”
Instead of words acting only as object names and the combinations of names making sentences and ideas, Wittgenstein began to describe language as a game, where all the players knew the rules and made moves accordingly, each word flexing to accommodate the game that was being played and the move that was being made. His most famous example of a language game was what he termed “builder’s language.” “A is building with building-stones,” he wrote, “there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones in the order which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ ‘beam.’ A calls them out. B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.” “Speaking a language,” he said, “is part of an activity, of a form of life.”
This “builder’s language” was created about the same time that Wittgenstein decided to take up a new formal occupation of architecture. Though he never built another house after that one in Vienna, architecture made sense for Wittgenstein, more sense than a career in philosophy or language. It was easier to build houses that he never had to live in.
It had been months since Stephen, David, and I had all seen one another, when we rode on that train together in Chicago and they told me that a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein had lived in the same small village where I was moving, not far from continental Europe’s largest glacier. Even then, our meeting was just chance; we happened to walk to the same station at the same time; we happened to be heading in the same direction, getting on and off at the very same stop. We happened to all decide to spend that rainy evening out on the town, rather than staying warm and dry in each of our own apartments.
We would not make it to Wittgenstein’s cabin, or not all of us at least, and I wonder now if I already knew this, even at the time. What I do know is that night on the train we talked about the future like it was certain, like we believed, all evidence notwithstanding, that in a new place, in different air, everything that was lost could be fixed, recovered. Perhaps we thought we could find something in these places that would push up against loss and our leaving; perhaps we didn’t know you can’t always go back out the same door you once walked in. Whatever the reason, in the quiet heat of that passenger train, we dreamed of building something solid, something thick and hopeful, with walls and doors and windows.
Both guys were wearing shirts and ties that night on the train in Chicago, collars unbuttoned; I was in a short, gray dress. I remember now noticing how much older Stephen and David looked than they had only months before and, also, how the yellow lights of the city reflected off their faces at every stop, then stayed, just for a moment.
I walked over to it, to the remnant of Wittgenstein’s cabin. There were some fresh animal tracks imprinted in the wet dirt, but otherwise only my own footsteps. I stepped carefully across the neatly piled rocks, picked up a brick, and traced my finger along its edge. I took a couple of photographs to show David and then set down my backpack and sat for a while, on the edge of a large stone, looking out at the Eidsvatnet Lake, the Sognefjord in the distance, and some small waterfalls and a tunnel lining the blacktop road a few miles away.
I tried to imagine Wittgenstein pacing or writing or yelling at the local kids to stay away, but I couldn’t see him, not there, not waiting by the dead tree or leaning against the metal pole—short, thin, tousled brown hair, rounded nose—not standing on that overgrown foundation. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t imagine him without his cabin. In the pictures I’d seen of Wittgenstein, and even on a hand-drawn map, there had always been that cabin: two-story, square, neatly tiled roof, white-trimmed windows. I hadn’t considered that by the time I got there, the cabin might be long gone.
After a while the clouds began to appear in the distance again, and so I picked up my things to head back down the trail. I stopped, though, just for a minute, near the edge of the clearing. No more than a few meters from the house, there was a break in the trees; the center of the lake was still, but I could see farther now and realized that the water at its edges was not. From the east, it was fed by a river of melting ice; to the west, it rushed through a narrow channel, past the guesthouse and the village, and into the fjord.
It was the same water that would travel down that fjord, past more green mountains and small villages and larger towns, past car ferries and bridges and boats, and then to the very edge of the land itself, splitting into the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea and maybe eventually finding its way to the Atlantic Ocean. As I stood in the place Wittgenstein probably once stood, I wondered if what he wanted in those years in Norway was an edge, something to cut back against, some way to name all that had already happened and all that was to come.
I imagine that at some other point in time all that water might have looked like a beacon.
For a few summers after the guesthouse apartment in the basement had nearly been finished—bathroom and kitchen tiled, walls plastered, electrical and plumbing handled—Darrell and Annette stopped working on the house. Darrell was going to graduate school and Annette was watching their now three small kids. They’d enlisted the finances of other investors too, which meant any renovations had to pass by three or four sets of hands.
When I came then, instead of sawing or nailing or ripping off siding, there were frantic bursts of cleaning spearheaded by Annette: mopping wooden floors, shaking out thirty-year-old carpets, wiping down walls, making rounds through the house every day, at two or three p.m., picking up after children. There wa
s a list of still-unfinished projects—rooms that needed painting, floors to refinish, a balcony that was hanging precariously off the side of the house, held up by a single unanchored two-by-four—but those were relegated to someday in the future, when there would be extra time or funds. The black roof got more and more chipped; the white paint, which we’d once redone, grayed against the river’s spray.
I should have realized that for every project there is either an end or a point of abandon, should have reminded myself that it wasn’t my house to fix anyway, that none of the houses were my projects. I didn’t; instead I swept the bare floors in the attic, cleaned the kitchen countertops, and helped my friends move couches down three flights of stairs and then back up them again. All along—even though I might not have been able to articulate it then—I fell further and further into that place, like I had always lived there.
DRIVING WYOMING
It’s five a.m., still dark, and the steam is rising off the cracked blacktop centerline like fog. I would like to be dreaming, but I am not; I’m in my car, driving south from Wyoming to Colorado on Highway 287, one of the most terrifying and beautiful highways in America. The seventy-two-mile stretch I once drove every day drops three thousand feet through the Rocky Mountains, from a high plain—the Laramie Ridge to the east, the Snowy Range to the west, climbing blue-gray from the snowfields—to a low forest of red-granite boulders, ponderosas, and scotch pines.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 5