by Heather Ross
Without a job, I could not pay rent, and so I moved out of that small, sweet house and in with my mother, who was living in a house that she was caretaking, and got a job as a bartender at a restaurant on the other side of the mountain, in Jefferson-ville. On my first day off, I borrowed her car and drove to the bookstore in Burlington and looked through books about internships. I thought that maybe I could be a teacher, and I loved to be outdoors, so I selected an internship in environmental education in Mendocino, California. I copied down the phone number and address onto a scrap of paper and returned the book to its shelf. I saved a little bit of money, not very much, and flew, over Christmas, to California to see my father and my sister. I had applied for the internship and had an interview with its director in Berkeley. My sister drove me to the meeting from Santa Cruz, and we talked about how nice it would be to live on the same coast. Her life seemed so clean, so stable to me. She had stopped coming to Vermont in the summers, and while she never said it, I could tell that she thought of it as nothing but a place full of dead-end roads and sad, poor people who drank too much. I knew that she was wrong, but I also knew that there was nothing there for me, at least not now.
I met the director of the environmental education program in a busy bakery in Berkeley, surrounded by earthy-looking people. Penny was tiny, with a sweet face and a very small, almost high, voice. We talked about being outside, about my having grown up outdoors, and about why I thought it was important that kids feel comfortable in nature, if not close to it. I told her about the beaver pond and about the frogs that I had caught and saved. “You are certainly an environmentalist,” she said. Then she leaned in to ask me a final, logistical question. “This job is an internship. We will give you a place to live in one of our on-site cabins, but you’ll only be paid seventy-five dollars a week. Are you sure you’ll be able to get by on that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I believe I will.”
I saved up as much as I could during the rest of the winter, which wasn’t very much, and then bought a train ticket from Waterbury, Vermont, to Los Angeles, California, for $312. The night before I left, Matthew and Elaine, a good friend, one of the few who were still in Vermont, came to say good-bye. My mother was angry at me all the time now because I had borrowed her car too many times or because I was leaving or because she didn’t know when I was coming back. Once, when Penny called our house to talk to me about housing, my mother had asked her, “How long will Heather be in California?” On the night before I left, after drinking five beers, she turned to me, with Matthew and Elaine looking on, and said, “You’ve been treating my home like a hotel, you spoiled little brat. Now it’s time to check out.” And then she stumbled up to bed. I almost left without saying good-bye, but at the last minute she came down the crooked little stairway and wrapped her long, thin arms around me, and held me, and told me not to do anything stupid. And then I drove away from her house in Elaine’s car, with Matthew following behind us. She stood in the window, and I could see that she was crying.
I rode a bus to Springfield, Massachusetts, and boarded a train that took me to Ohio. From there I went to Idaho, then Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I spent a few days with friends. Then I caught a ride with other friends to Salt Lake City, where I boarded another train to Los Angeles, traveling south into the high desert, away from the Rocky Mountains. It was warm enough on the second night to walk between the train’s passenger cars to the luggage cars, which had big sliding windows that could be pushed open, and lean out into the current of desert air and see the stars. I stayed up all night, leaning against a pile of suitcases, smoking cigarettes, and looking at the sky, watching the moon rise and then disappear again.
My sister and her husband met me in Los Angeles the next morning and drove me all the way, a full ten hours, to Mendocino. I hadn’t realized how far it was, having mistakenly assumed that since both towns were in the same state that the distance between them couldn’t be more than a few hours. We had lunch in Mendocino, a beautiful town that surprised me because it felt and looked like it could be in coastal Maine or Massachusetts. Then we drove down an endless, narrow gravel road into the bit of old-growth redwood that still remained until we reached a dark little grove, under which sat my tiny cabin. Around one side wrapped a small, dark stream, thick and quiet, surrounded by deep green moss and high ferns. It felt like a forgotten forest, an ancient Jurassic place, with trees so high and dense that even though it was midafternoon it felt like evening. Penny met me on the road, brought me into the dining hall, and introduced me to the naturalists and then the kitchen staff. I walked back to my cabin and said good-bye to my sister, who looked worried to be leaving me there. I told her that I would buy a car soon—how I thought I would do this, on seventy-five dollars a week, I do not know—and visit her often, and then I was alone, standing in what felt like a new world, suddenly aware that nobody waiting for me in the dining hall knew anything about me.
The Mendocino Woodlands, a place that I had picked—no, stolen—randomly from a thick book that I had pulled off a shelf in a bookstore, was a lucky landing spot. It happened to be a place where community, above all else, was valued, where the staff was nurturing, supportive, and exceedingly nonjudg-mental. The place itself was bare-bones, beautiful, and rustic; the woods were dark and wet and always green, and the paths through them were almost hidden, and lonely and peaceful. It was as much of a resting place as I could have hoped for. I tried to make fires at night in my little stone fireplace, but its chimney had been so cold and so wet for so long that it was nearly impossible. Still, it wasn’t as cold as what I had known before, and eventually I would break the anxious habit of always wanting to start a fire and keep it going, and I would learn to seek out spots in the sun, which is what the other naturalists, the ones who had grown up in California, always did. We would sit for hours in the meadows, on our days off, and talk about all the things that we wanted to do, with each other, with our lives, with our futures.
My job was to introduce children to nature in a way that fostered wonder, respect, and stewardship. Each week a new batch of them arrived in a school bus, and we would bring them out into the meadow, where there was sun, and introduce ourselves and this place to them. On my third or fourth week at the Woodlands, we welcomed a group of sixth graders from a public school in the Napa Valley, many of them children of farm workers. We had been told that many of these kids would leave high school to work in the fields, that most did not speak English at home, that their communities were full of drugs, even gangs. We would always begin introductions by acting out a skit for them, each of us taking the role of an animal or an inanimate object, and teaching them the basic rules that would govern our community for the coming week. I was a “rock” that week, which meant that I would be the thing that the “child” who was running through camp would trip over. I still had the large laminated placard with the word “ROCK” around my neck when the skit had ended and we were introducing ourselves to our students.
“My name,” I said, “is Rock.”
“No, it isn’t!” said one little girl.
“Yes, it is, at least for this week,” I said. “And since we’ve only just met, you can’t really say it isn’t my name, can you? And if there is anyone here who would like to be someone new this week, someone who doesn’t get into trouble, say, even though maybe they do at home, this is your chance, because I’ve never met you, and neither has anyone else here. Whoever you tell me you are, I will believe you.”
A thin boy, in clothes that had clearly belonged to somebody else before they had been his, stepped forward and held up his hand. “OK, then,” he said, turning to his classmates and his teachers and throwing up both of his arms with beaming pride. “My name is Spiderman!” And then his classmates and his teachers, and me, and all of my new friends, we clapped and shouted for him.
HOW TO
fend off a bear
WHEN I TOLD MY SISTER, OVER THE phone, that I was moving in with Mick, she didn’t even try
to hide her disappointment.
She had been thrilled when I moved to California and generally happy when I ended up in Mendocino, which was just four hours up the coast from Scotts Valley, where she now lived with her husband in a tidy suburban house surrounded by excellent schools and pretty vistas and good jobs. But she had always been worried about whether or not I might meet a nice man there and start a family, which was her singular focus.
In Mendocino, I worked seasonally as a naturalist and wilderness guide and, for a time, at a horse barn. I traveled between jobs anywhere I liked, with whomever I wanted, on the cheap. My sister was getting impatient with my lifestyle because it didn’t seem to be leading to settling down and because it was clear that the men I was meeting and dating were prone to wandering, trying to avoid responsibility and competitive career fields. Once, I called her after a date. “What does he do?” she asked, carefully.
“He’s a surfer,” was my reply, which was met with a long silence.
“I meant, as a job.”
“Oh, well, he bartends sometimes and waits tables. He wants to keep his days free for, you know, surfing.”
“Why don’t you just date an alcoholic?” she said. “They are free most nights.”
There were things about Mick that she liked, like the fact that he had a job—he was a contractor—and a nice family. There were also things about Mick that she didn’t like, such as the fact that he was ten years older than I was, that he lived in Arcata, which meant that I would be seven hours away instead of four, and most of all, that he lived in a teepee.
Mick was a woodworker and a builder, specializing in craftsman-style design. He pulled down old barns and water towers and built new homes and structures from them, beautiful structures that made me believe, along with his earnest demeanor and seemingly impressive work ethic—he went to work every morning at five—that one day we would live in a sound and lovely house and that this would be my home and my life.
When I told my sister that I had planned to move in with him, her response was, “Are you going to get married?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said, because I wasn’t.
“I’ll give you three years,” she said, “and if you aren’t wearing a ring, I’m going to come up there and pack your shit into my car and move you out myself.”
I wasn’t thrilled about moving into the teepee, either, I had to admit, but not because it was a teepee, which can be pretty cozy when properly situated and well outfitted (though that was not the case with this particular teepee). It was big enough, certainly, but instead of the beds being built into its sides in the traditional way, where they could be out of the way of the smoke hole at the top of the structure, Mick’s bed—and now my bed—was centered so that is sat directly under the smoke hole, where a wood-stove or fire pit should have been, and because this was northern, coastal California and the teepee sat at the edge of a thick, damp redwood and fir forest, water seeped in from everywhere, especially from the hole in the roof, directly above the bed.
The first night I slept in the teepee, Mick stepped in ahead of me and pulled a heavy blue plastic tarp off the bed, and the sound of at least a gallon of water hitting the ground beneath us—the bare ground—was unmistakable, even in the pitch-black darkness. “Voilà!” he said, with what sounded like a grin. There was something romantic and brave about it then, in my twenty-three-year-old mind, especially at night, when I was lying in the dark under heavy blankets next to him, listening to him talk about what he wanted to build in that clearing and the sort of life he wanted to lead, with horses and children. There was also something very familiar and very comfortable about this bed, this place, this wild collection of plans and dreams, barely separated from the wilderness around it by feeble tarps and blankets, sitting on a damp and cold ground that I knew—but did not want to remind myself—could quietly digest everything, leaving no trace of us at all.
When I moved in with Mick, he had begun to build a small cabin. The teepee was still standing and was now our guesthouse. Nobody was asking to stay over. The cabin would be our home until Mick had built a house for us, which would happen, by his estimation, over the course of the next two or three years. For this reason, the cabin was not in the center of the clearing but at the edge of it, under the trees.
The two-hundred-square-foot cabin had no phone or electricity, but we did have a water tank and a solar-powered pump that supplied a kitchen sink and an outdoor shower. Our outhouse did not have walls, and was hidden from sight—barely—behind trees on the other side of the clearing. We had a small but powerful woodstove for heat and a gas cookstove and lantern, plus a few solar-powered lights by the bed for reading and a solar-powered refrigerator that took up a lot of space but actually didn’t work very well. We used it like a big cooler, replacing a big block of ice in the vegetable drawer every few days, which meant carrying a plastic box full of water through the cabin, trying not to spill it as you rushed toward the door. My routine, at least for the first summer and fall at the cabin, was organized around daylight hours: up at dawn, which was when Mick would leave for his shop in town, coffee on my front step, a drive into town for groceries or the occasional drawing or painting class at the College of the Redwoods, the community college I was attending at the time. I walked through the woods in the mornings and learned about the mushrooms that grew there, which included huge amounts of prized chanterelles, which I picked and sent to my cousin in New York City, who used them in the restaurant he managed there—The Red Cat. I cooked a big dinner for us every afternoon, with a small battery-powered radio next to me playing NPR, on a wooden countertop that stood in front of an opening in the wall where a large window would eventually go, gazing out onto my meadow and thinking about the house that would be there.
The woodstove was efficient and the space was small enough that it could be heated pretty quickly, except, of course, for the fact that the cabin was missing this window, which took up most of one wall. Mick had plans to build a craftsman-style window frame by hand, but by the beginning of November it still had not been done, so he hung a sheet of plastic over the window and the doorway (because he also planned to build a door by hand, but that had not happened, either) and the room grew instantly warm, while my view began to disappear.
The outdoor shower’s water pressure was so light that when I stood underneath it, I couldn’t feel water hitting me but could just feel my head getting heavier and wetter. I got a gym membership (frowned upon by Mick) and began spending a lot of time in town, living in the cabin out of a duffel bag that held my toiletries and the only mirror we owned, which was four inches wide. “I feel like you aren’t even living here anymore,” he complained, in an increasingly familiar tone of disapproval. Then I—instead of telling him that living on his terms was too hard, especially when he couldn’t seem to get a door or a window hung, especially since he went to work every day, at dawn, in a woodshop with a spacious office with a phone and hot coffee, especially since I was really the one living, cooking, being there—begged him for a claw-foot bathtub. He procured one, and we dragged it into the woods and set it up under two big fir trees and found a piece of PVC pipe that was long enough to funnel water from the shower head. We fixed a way to keep it in place long enough to fill the tub, and I spent that winter taking long baths in the evenings and sometimes in the mornings, too, with the rain and sometimes even a bit of snow falling around me, and for a few more months I relaxed into a bare-bones, but beautiful, home.
But as the second winter approached, with still no window or door, I started to panic. I rented a little office in town and had my own phone for the first time in more than a year, and I used it to call my sister regularly. I still spoke with confidence about the cabin; I could be happy there while Mick built a larger house, especially if we had a phone line put in and, of course, I added, if he put the windows and doors in. “The what?” she said, unable to comprehend a house with entire walls missing. I assured her all would be well, but by then I knew
that even though Mick went to work at five each morning, he spent most of his day drinking coffee and having long, earnest conversations with his staff and crew, who were also very earnest, and that his company had developed a reputation for being slow to finish the complex jobs they took. “I’m coming up there for Thanksgiving,” she said, and hung up.
She didn’t ask a lot of questions when she saw the cabin; she didn’t need to. I showed her a photo that Mick’s sister, a photographer, had taken of it from the side that did have a finished window, with my bathtub in the foreground, which made it all look very beautiful. “I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful,” my sister said. “It is.” I thought I had begun to win her over, but then around Christmastime a letter arrived from her. Inside was a newspaper clipping about the Unabomber, who had sequestered himself in a not-too-far-away wilderness and built himself a cabin, which was pictured in a black-and-white photo, from an angle that showed a single, small window that looked remarkably familiar to me. The clipping contained a note from her, mentioning little else than the fact that the photo had been entered as evidence of the man’s utter insanity. The caption read, “Primitive home to the Unabomber, of seven years, just 200 sq. feet!”
My second summer in the cabin was the summer that the bear began coming. When a black bear determines that your house is a good source for food, you’ve got a real problem. When a black bear determines that your house is a good source for food and your house only has three complete walls, and no front door at all, it’s more complicated.
The important thing to know about bears, when you are defending your home and your food from them, is that they are not acting on instinct when they hunt for their meals. Bears learn everything from their mothers. They are born in the early spring and stay in and near their dens until they are old enough to go foraging. Their mother will then introduce them to every food source that she knows about, and this will happen in the late spring and throughout the summer. A bear will often stay with its mother through another winter and begin to start venturing out on its own the following summer. A mother bear will even teach her cubs to help her steal; they have been known to send cubs up thin trees and out onto weak branches to claw at the ropes that hold hikers’ food bags until they fall to the ground. Our bear was a mother bear, with two yearlings, and that was the summer that they found us: two people and a big pile of food sitting on the edge of a clearing.