by Mary Oliver
2.
I began the house when I returned one spring after a year of teaching in a midwestern city. I had been, for months, responsible, sedate, thoughtful, and, for most of my daylight hours, indoors. I was sick for activity. And so, instead of lingering on the porch with my arrangement of tools, banging and punching together some simple and useful thing—another bookshelf, another table—I began the house.
When anything is built in our town, it is more importantly a foundation than a structure. Nothing—be it ugly, nonconforming, in violation of bylaws or neighbors’ rights—nothing, once up, has ever been torn down. And almost nothing exists as it was originally constructed. On our narrow strip of land we are a build-up, add-on society. My house today, crooked as it is, stands. It has an undeniable value: it exists. It may therefore be enlarged eventually, even unto rentable proportions. The present owners of the property would not dream of discarding it. I can see from the road, they have given it a new roof and straightened out some doubtful portions of the peaked section. To one end of the peak, they have attached a metal rod that holds, in the air above the house, a statue of a heron, in the attitude of easy flight. My little house, looking upward, must be astonished.
The tools I used in my building of the house, and in all my labor of this sort, were a motley assortment of hand tools: hammer, tack hammer, drivers of screws, rasps, planes, saws small-toothed and rip, pliers, wrenches, awls. They had once belonged to my grandfather, and some of them to my great-grandfather, who was a carpenter of quality, and used the finer title “cabinetmaker.” This man I know only from photographs and an odd story or two: for example, he built his own coffin, of walnut, and left it, to be ready when needed, with the town mortician. Eventually, like the tiniest of houses, and with his body inside, it was consumed by flame.
These tools, though so closely mine, were not made therefore easy for me to use. I was, frankly, accident-prone; while I was making anything my hands and shins and elbows, if not other parts of my body, were streaked with dirt and nicks. Gusto, not finesse, was my trademark here. And often enough, with these tools, I would come to a place where I could not wrest some necessary motion from my own wrists, or lift, or cut through. Then I would have to wait, in frustration, for a friend or acquaintance, or even a stranger—male, and stronger than I—to come along, and I would simply ask for help to get past that instant, that twist of the screw. Provincetown men, though they may seem rough to the unknowing, are as delicious and courteous as men are made. “Sure, darling,” the plumber would say, or the neighbor passing by, or the fisherman stepping over from his yard, and he would help me, and would make a small thing of it.
3.
Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit. Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imaginations! Sometimes these are fearful, gloomy, enclosed places. At other times they are bright and have many windows and are surrounded by gardens combed and invitational, or unpathed and wild. Surely such houses appearing in our sleep-work represent the state of the soul, or, if you prefer it, the state of the mind. Real estate, in any case, is not the issue of dreams. The condition of our true and private self is what dreams are about. If you rise refreshed from a dream—a night’s settlement inside some house that has filled you with pleasure—you are doing okay. If you wake to the memory of squeezing confinement, rooms without air or light, a door difficult or impossible to open, a troubling disorganization or even wreckage inside, you are in trouble—with yourself. There are (dream) houses that pin themselves upon the windy porches of mountains, that open their own windows and summon in flocks of wild and colorful birds—and there are houses that hunker upon narrow ice floes adrift upon endless, dark waters; houses that creak, houses that sing; houses that will say nothing at all to you though you beg and plead all night for some answer to your vexing questions.
As such houses in dreams are mirrors of the mind or the soul, so an actual house, such as I began to build, is at least a little of that inner state made manifest. Jung, in a difficult time, slowly built a stone garden and a stone tower. Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond, ten feet by fifteen feet under the tall, arrowy pines, was surely a dream-shape come to life. For anyone, stepping away from actions where one knows one’s measure is good. It shakes away an excess of seriousness. Building my house, or anything else, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery. Building my house, I was joyous all day long.
The material issue of a house, however, is a matter not so much of imagination and spirit as it is of particular, joinable, weighty substance—it is brick and wood, it is foundation and beam, sash and sill; it is threshold and door and the latch upon the door. In the seventies and the eighties, in this part of the world if not everywhere, there was an ongoing, monstrous binge of building, or tearing back and rebuilding—and carting away of old materials to the (then-titled) dump. Which, in those days, was a lively and even social place. Work crews made a continual effort toward bulldozing the droppings from the trucks into some sort of order, shoving at least a dozen categories of broken and forsaken materials, along with reusable materials, into separate areas. Gulls, in flocks like low white clouds, screamed and rippled over the heaps of lumber, looking for garbage that was also dumped, and often in no particular area. Motels, redecorating, would bring three hundred mattresses in the morning, three hundred desks in the afternoon. Treasures, of course, were abundantly sought and found. And good wood—useful wood—wood it was a sin to bury, not to use again. The price of lumber had not yet skyrocketed, so even new lumber lay seamed in with the old, the price passed on to the customer. Cutoffs, and lengths. Pine, fir, oak flooring, shingles of red and white cedar, ply, cherry trim, also tar paper and insulation, screen doors new and old, and stovepipe old and new, and bricks, and, more than once, some power tools left carelessly, I suppose, in a truck bed, under the heaps of trash. This is where I went for my materials, along with others, men and women both, who simply roved, attentively, through all the mess until they found what they needed, or felt they would, someday, use. Clothes, furniture, old dolls, old high chairs, bikes; once a child’s metal bank in the shape of a dog, very old; once a set of copper-bottomed cookware still in its original cartons; once a bag of old Christmas cards swept from the house of a man who had died only a month or so earlier, in almost every one of them a dollar bill.
Here I found everything I needed, including nails from half-full boxes spilled into the sand. All I lacked—only because I lacked the patience to wait until it came along—was one of the ridge beams; this I bought at the local lumber company and paid cash for; thus the entire house cost me $3.58.
Oh, the intimidating and beautiful hardwoods! No more could I cut across the cherry or walnut or the oak than across stone! It was pine I looked for, with its tawny pattern of rings, its crisp knots, its willingness to be broken, cut, split, and its fragrance that never reached the air but made the heart gasp with its sweetness. Plywood I had no love of, though I took it when found and used it when I could, knowing it was no real thing, and alien to the weather, and apt to parch and swell, or buckle, or rot. Still, I used it. My little house was a patchwork. It was organic as a garden. It was free of any promise of exact inches, though at last it achieved a fair if not a strict linearity. On its foundation of old railroad ties, its framing of old wood, old ply, its sheets of tar paper, its rows of pale shingles, it stood up. Stemming together everything with sixpenny nails, eightpenny nails, spikes, screws, I was involved, frustrated, devoted, resolved, nicked and scraped, and delighted. The work went slowly. The roof went on, was shingled with red cedar. I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.
When my hou
se was finished, my friend Stanley Kunitz gave me a yellow door, discarded from his house at the other end of town. Inside, I tacked up a van Gogh landscape, a Blake poem, a photograph of Mahler, a picture M. had made with colored chalk. Some birds’ nests hung in the corners. I lit the lamp. I was done.
4.
There is something you can tell people over and over, and with feeling and eloquence, and still never say it well enough for it to be more than news from abroad—people have no readiness for it, no empathy. It is the news of personal aging—of climbing, and knowing it, to some unrepeatable pitch and coming forth on the other side, which is pleasant still but which is, unarguably, different—which is the beginning of descent. It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively. The plumbers in town now are the sons of our old plumber. I cut some pine boards for some part of an hour, and I am tired. A year or so ago, hammering, I hit my thumb, directly and with force, and lost the nail for a half year. I was recently given a power drill, which also sets and removes screws. It could be a small cannon, so apprehensive am I of its fierce and quick power. When I handle it well (which to begin with means that I aim it correctly), difficult tasks are made easy. But when I do not, I hold an angry weasel in my hand.
I hardly used the little house—it became a place to store garden tools, boxes of this or that. Did I write one poem there? Yes, I did, and a few more. But its purpose never was to be shelter for thought. I built it to build it, stepped out over the threshold, and was gone.
I don’t think I am old yet, or done with growing. But my perspective has altered—I am less hungry for the busyness of the body, more interested in the tricks of the mind. I am gaining, also, a new affection for wood that is useless, that has been tossed out, that merely exists, quietly, wherever it has ended up. Planks on the beach rippled and salt-soaked. Pieces of piling, full of the tunnels of shipworm. In the woods, fallen branches of oak, of maple, of the dear, wind-worn pines. They lie on the ground and do nothing. They are travelers on the way to oblivion.
The young man now—that carpenter we began with—places his notebook carefully beside him and rises and, as though he had just come back from some great distance, looks around. There are his tools, there is the wood; there is his unfinished task, to which, once more, he turns his attention. But life is no narrow business. On any afternoon he may hear and follow this same rhapsody, turning from his usual labor, swimming away into the pleasures, the current of language. More power to him!
For myself, I have passed him by and have gone into the woods. Near the path, one of the tall maples has fallen. It is early spring, so the crimped maroon flowers are just emerging. Here and there slabs of the bark have exploded away in the impact of its landing. But, mostly, it lies as it stood, though not such a net for the wind as it was. What is it now? What does it signify? Not Indolence, surely, but something, all the same, that balances with Ambition.
Call it Rest. I sit on one of the branches. My idleness suits me. I am content. I have built my house. The blue butterflies, called azures, twinkle up from the secret place where they have been waiting. In their small blue dresses they float among the branches, they come close to me, one rests for a moment on my wrist. They do not recognize me as anything very different from this enfoldment of leaves, this wind-roarer, this wooden palace lying down, now, upon the earth, like anything heavy, and happy, and full of sunlight, and half asleep.
SECTION FIVE
Provincetown
Give me a fish, I eat for a day: teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime.
FISHERMAN’S MOTTO
Now let my fingers and pencils and my beloved old machine with its letters and numbers fly over the sweet harbor and gaze instead into the town itself. A tiny town as towns and cities are now, but to me it held a perfect sufficiency. Front Street and Back Street. Of course they had other names, but this is town talk. One traffic light, one doctor, one drugstore. A scattering of restaurants, saloons. And the boatyards.
Most of the town lived for its fishing, a rough trade taken on, for the fish then were plenty. Many of the men were from Portugal, the islands. Not all of course, but their hardiness was noticeable. Men, and boys in small boats that scarcely ever carried emergency gear for the men. Which meant at times the loss of both, the boat and its crew. When a boat did not return there was grieving in more than one house. Still, the next morning the boats went out, without their brothers. It felt close to nobility.
A memory: hauling the net up to the surface of the water and onto the deck was not easy work; the men had to be strong, quick, and accurate. In the morning sun, a few of the old men, retired now, would often gather together on the bench in front of the New York Store. Not one of them had all ten fingers.
Speaking of the net, which sank deeply and broadly, many a curiosity might appear along with the catch. Once, a human leg bone. Certainly in these days it would have been taken to the police station, not so in the time I am talking of, but instead it was carried to the priest at the Catholic church. Where because of an old leg wound from the war, the owner of this piece of body was identified. Missing is only missing to insurance companies, but now the insurance would be paid, if the family had such. A blessing to a whole family.
The town was full of nicknames—a few I remember: Moon, Iron Man, Jimmy Peek (in remembrance of his grandfather, who, it is said, peeked a great deal). And then there was Flyer, owner of the boatyard. One winter, already of a great age, his shoulders stiffened into uselessness. He filled two pails with sand and water and carried them everywhere he went, the entire winter. By spring his shoulders were fine. You do not meet such people everywhere.
I don’t mean to slight the women of the town. Visiting a Portuguese house often deeply snuggled among flowers, it took no more than three minutes from my knock before I would find myself sitting in front of a bowl of steaming, delicious Portuguese soup and adding my own voice to the family chatter.
_______
Provincetown has what we called Mediterranean light, which for years had brought artists to set up their easels on the shore, on the dunes, on street corners, or perhaps in their own houses. Writers came as well. No occupation was considered elite. Provincetown became the place to come not only for the light but for the friendliness that sustained all of us, or so it seemed. I meet the plumber in the hardware store, “How’s your work going?” he would say. Pretty good, I’d answer, and how about you? “Pretty well,” he would say. And we would both ramble off smiling, feeling the sweetness of it.
And then the terrible change began. The great rafts of fish began to diminish. The satisfaction of a day’s work also began to vanish. Overfishing, climate change, and little boats that were growing older every year were the causes. In other towns, larger boats were built to travel farther out to sea, something the Provincetown fleet could not do.
A town cannot live on dreams. The change was slow but harsh. The young men and women, boys and girls left to find work and to build another life. And the town became, not all at once but steadily, a town of pleasure. People swarmed in on weekends, and they still do. And it will no doubt go on. And there is no blame in this. The town had to find another way to live.
The tourist business was in. Late into the night the bands played. Closing hours changed, became later. There were weekend people and people who could afford a longer stay or buy a summer home. At the same time, I must say that many of the changes were important. A home for young artists and painters was established as well as a scientific center for the study of our coastal waters. But generally it became just, well, different. One could say it fast became a place to visit or live for a while, and to spend money. Not so much in which to live a life. To dance and make noise, though I do not mean to criticize all frolic. It was just, well, different.
_______
&
nbsp; I don’t know if I am heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have already lived in heaven for fifty years. Thank you, Provincetown.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Who Cometh Here?” was first published in Appalachia Journal.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following works:
“Upstream” from Blue Iris: Poems and Essays by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
“Sister Turtle,” “Building the House,” “Winter Hours,” “The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible,” “Swoon,” and “Some Thoughts on Whitman” from Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems and Poems by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1999 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
“Bird” from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2003 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
“Wordsworth’s Mountain” from Long Life: Essays and Other Writings by Mary Oliver, copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
“My Friend Walt Whitman,” “Staying Alive,” “Owls,” “The Ponds,” “Of Power and Time,” and “Blue Pastures” from Blue Pastures by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1995 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
“Ropes” from Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press). Copyright © 2013 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
“Emerson: An Introduction” by Mary Oliver, copyright © 2000 by Mary Oliver; from The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. Used by permission of Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.