by Mark Doty
That arrogance which says I alone bear the responsibility for my body, for my fate, can suspend compassion. What are we to do, holding these tenets, when people we love fail to stay healthy? What if we “fail” to be well ourselves; mustn’t that then be a moral or spiritual failure? And if we ask for what we get, if all our suffering and illnesses are brought upon ourselves—cancer from repressed anger, AIDS from wounded sexuality—then what is the role of compassion? Just last night, at a benefit, a man who’s lived with AIDS for more than a decade was applauded by the crowd. He said he owed his life to the love of his partner, and the love of his friends and family; I found myself cringing inside, even though I’m glad the guy who said this is alive and well and feeling loved. But so many men who are dead were deeply loved, too, and finally this statement erases them, denies the validity of their real passions, of what was felt by and for them. We would like to think the dead could have helped it, because if they could, we could. But a virus cannot be loved away. Jim isn’t alive because of his attitude; Bob isn’t dead because of his.
We trivialize pain if we regard it as a preventable condition the spirit need not suffer. If we attempt to edit it out, will it away, regard it as our own creation, then don’t we erase some essential part of the spirit’s education? Pain is one of our teachers, albeit our darkest and most demanding one.
If I am more tolerant of Bob’s fatalism here, it is because he was already ill; I can somehow find in myself more empathy for his position, as he must have felt himself being swept away. I am less tolerant of Jim’s position because of the outcome it led to; as Wally grew more ill, he became less and less a presence in Wally’s life. I don’t want to overstate this; it’s not as if they were very close and then Jim suddenly walked away. But he simply wasn’t around. He visited us in Provincetown when Wally was still walking, in the summer of 1992. And then I think we saw him briefly at Christmas, in Rockland, that year; as far as I know, he and Wally never saw each other again. During the nine months Wally was bedridden, entirely incapacitated, we never saw him. Intellectually, I can understand the need to stay away—since, being HIV-positive oneself, seeing one’s own brother dying would be not only terrible in itself but a frightening reflection of one’s own possible future. I understand it, but I haven’t forgiven it. My recalcitrance and crankiness about this is in part because of my distrust of new-age attitudes; I’m horrified by a spirituality which is too transcendent for human contact.
And I am intolerant of Jim, of course, because I also long for that sort of control, which illness and death have taught me I cannot have.
A few nights after I wrote those pages, this is what I dreamed: I had to parachute from an airplane in a strange way, sitting in the kind of plastic chair you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room. I was strapped into the chair, pushed out the door, and then fell and fell, it seemed almost endlessly, toward the earth. I can’t remember landing, exactly, but where I arrived was a hospital room, and the man in the bed was alternately Wally and Jim. He—either man—was in the last hours of his life. When he died I wept and wept; the dream was full of the enormity of the weeping. In a while I knew I had to tell Wally’s mother that one of her sons had died, though by then I wasn’t sure which.
I woke then, shaken, not crying now that I was awake but aware of the sobbing that had filled my sleep. I think my dream was about compassion for Jim, about seeing him and Wally in the same bed, the same boat. Just as I think the darker underside of his spirituality is judgment, so my dream points up to me how my own judgment of him has obscured my compassion. If I were him, if I were HIV-positive, what would I have done? It’s easy for me to say I’d never disappear from my brother’s life, but I don’t know that; can any of us know what we’d do under that disfiguring pressure? Judgment is easier than compassion, my dream reminds me; the dream instructs me, falling toward loss, the fall I can’t control, though I survive it, to see the ways in which Wally and Jim are of a piece.
We tried to steer a course between fatalism and an unacceptable optimism—between feeling completely out of control and claiming a sort of complete authority neither of us could believe in. What we wanted, desperately, was some way for things to get back to “normal”—absurd as that sounds, in a way, it is also the necessary condition of ongoingness. Somehow we have to make whatever dreadful knowledge we have part of the fabric of every day; we have to find a way to continue our ordinary transactions with the world in the light of new and extraordinary knowledge. Of course nothing could ever be the same again, but how to integrate that pressure day to day, every hour? The sense of “normalcy” is founded in part on denial, on forgetting. So it’s difficult to remember, to trace the ways in which we moved toward acting as if our lives were normal again. Wally still went to work, spray-painting props and designing displays for shop windows. I tended the garden and wrote, through the summer, and in September went back to teaching. We’d go on as if we were fine, and then crash and go on again. Wally wasn’t sick, not just then; there was time in front of us—who knew how much, but suddenly any amount of time seemed a luxury, a gift. What would we do with it?
Refuge
We bought a cabin in the woods—a camp, in Vermont parlance. It wasn’t something we’d planned to do, wasn’t something that really made sense to do, not in any practical way.
There was, one Sunday, an ad in the newspaper with a photograph of a little house, on six more-or-less acres of woodland; there was something infinitely appealing about the picture, and we thought we were planning a sort of elaborate Sunday drive when we called the realtor and asked where the place was located. We’d just drive by, we said, and take a look, and call again if we wanted to see it. We didn’t really plan to call again; this was an outing, a lark.
Through Plainfield, through Marshfield, two tiny, down-at-the-heels towns untouched for thirty years, the road wound along the Winooski River, through bottom farmlands, past a perpetual yard sale with tables of Avon bottles and farm tools, jetsam collecting rainwater, past the great hulks of barns whose cupolas and turrets made me think of grand wooden Russian churches with their shingled turrets and onion domes. Then a turn off Route 2, a smaller road through higher and higher farmlands, clusters of little trailers (“MAPLE SYRUP SOLD RIGHT HERE”) and into the thick woods of a state forest. A few miles through the tall evergreens and birch, a dirt road intersected the forest road. To the left the road climbed to Owl’s Head, a bald dome of rock reached by a winding trail, over which mist would often hang, veiling and transforming, so that the trail became a kind of moody Chinese landscape. To the right, the loggers’ road curved further down the mountain’s slope to the little camp, and beyond it, a couple of farmhouses which were all that remained of what had once been a logging town, complete with schoolhouse and hotel—gone now, their foundations half-visible in fields of milkweed and cow-vetch, butter-and-eggs and ragged sailors and Queen Anne’s lace.
The camp was a shingled gray house, trimmed in burgundy. Built in the twenties, the main room—into which we peered through every window, circling the house in an increasing state of infatuation—centering around a wood-fired cookstove. On a built-in table, covered with old red Formica, someone had left a deck of cards spread beneath the shade of the gas lamp. There was a little kitchen sink and counter, sporting calendars and a few old prints on the bare studs of the walls, from which protruded, every now and then, a coat hook made from the hoof and foreleg of a deer.
All along one side of the house, looking out into the cool depths of the woods, which seemed particularly lush and damp, starred with large stones decked in lichens and lavish clouds of moss, ran a screened-in porch. Its heavy old furniture—armchairs and a sofa a little too broken down for home, slipcovered in a faded flowery stuff—looked like the best place in the world for a summer afternoon’s reading. On a table beside the sofa sat a stuffed robin, mothy but still presentable, poised on some long-preserved branch, and a windup record player of uncertain vintage, next to a stack of heavy s
eventy-eights.
Both of us are so completely smitten that there’s almost no need to go in. The realtor lives just down the road a mile or two, on the forest’s edge. She’s a salty, wonderful woman with an interesting mix of country ways and urbane savvy, who herself used to spend childhood summers in the camp, and clearly she relishes the idea of a gay couple buying it because she knows what we’ll do with it. The tour of the inside only deepens the fascination—playing with the gaslights, climbing the fold-down stairs up into the sleeping loft, where two built-in log beds and tiny windows with green shutters call up fantasies of boys at summer camp. The fact that the whole place smells vaguely of mouse piss and dampness, of musty upholstery, somehow seems just right, as does every object within—taken individually, they aren’t much, but as a whole they somehow represent the history of the house, a heady distillation of summer after summer, years of pleasure, childhood, memory, escape.
There are good reasons not to buy it. Does anybody need a second house thirty miles from home? Especially when home is big and ramshackle, and logically we’d be better off using the money (which is not money, actually, but home equity) on decent plumbing. Isn’t it decadent to have two houses, when so many people don’t have one? And didn’t our uncertain future suggest that acquiring another house wasn’t exactly sensible?
But this is about longing, not logic, and it’s cheap, and practically effortless, and before we know it we own a camp, a mysterious little dacha on an impossibly narrow six-acre triangle bordered on one side by state forest, on the opposite side by the dirt road, and along the shortest side by a grassy, boggy marsh.
That marsh! Water from Owl’s Head wandered down the side of the mountain, in little freshets and mosquitoey swamp-spots through our woods. I loved that—our woods. The first thing we did was to make a trail, down from the house, winding through the forest toward the marsh, attempting to discover what our acres contained: an old apple tree, the ruins of a schoolhouse, a practical universe of mushrooms in splendid varieties of russet and cream and toast, almond and ghost-white. Evidence of deer, bear-scratches on the tree trunks, a raccoon who woke us in the night by knocking the bird feeder against a trunk to make the seed fall out. Realms of moss, and pockets of mud, and bugs.
Part of the water from the marsh bubbled from our spring—“ours” because the property came with a lease from the state of Vermont, one renewed year after year, to allow use of particularly cold and clear and fine water from a spring on the shoulder of the mountain, up on state land. A rubber pipe ran downhill from the spring to the camp itself.
Each autumn the rubber pipe had to be lifted out of the spring and drained, to keep the line from freezing and bursting; one of our first tasks was to climb the side of the mountain and put the pipe back into the spring, so that the water would flow back into the house again. Finding the spring was the problem. It wasn’t possible to follow the pipe, since over the course of fifty years or so it had become completely covered with fallen leaves, fir needles, moss; here and there it was visible for a few inches (just enough for some passing animal to bite, from time to time, so that we’d hear a hissing hose in the woods and know it was time for repairs) but then it would disappear, hopelessly lost. Someone had painted yellow circles on trees, as trail markers to lead to it, but time and weather had worn them away. Eventually a combination of yellow spots and tracking stream beds led to what seemed an enchanted place: out of a dark and mossy grotto formed by a cluster of stones, water welled up from somewhere so far beneath the mountain we couldn’t guess how long it had been traveling upward toward us.
It was necessary to reach into the dark, into the chilly water, to pull the pipe up, take off the plastic wrapper that sealed it for the winter, and fit on the brass cone which filtered out any moss that might find its way in and clog the pipe. Wally refused; I lay on my stomach on a stony bower of moss starred with wet leaves, and reached down into the bottomless world of the spring to find the pipe—like reaching down into time, into the darkness of a fairy place. When we opened the valves back at the camp, the sweet water—which had a kind of subtle presence to its taste, not a flavor exactly but a quality, which might have had something to do with our knowing its origins—came thundering and farting and blowing out the tap into the kitchen sink, rattling the house until the air in the half a mile of pipe was gone.
The water that we didn’t use trickled along, wandered, sank underground, feeding the moss and the alders and supporting the marsh in dry seasons. The marsh lay in a kind of saddle, a valley between bluish, misted Owl’s Head and another mountain considerably further away. A creek wound through the middle, frequently dammed by beaver, who’d flood the road and begin their work on the building of their paradise until the farmer who depended on the road had enough and undid their labors—and probably undid them, too, in some unkind fashion. Over the unhurried stream and the surrounding reeds a kind of haze used to hang, as if the light itself were concentrated there, sunlight become something thickened, palpable. It felt, to me, like the heart of that country, a place where the closed and cool world of the forest opened out into long but intimate distances, where the yellow and green horizontals of the marsh countered the mountains’ blue-violet verticals. Red-winged blackbirds threaded the air.
On the other side of the marsh, reached by the tenuous little bridge which ran above the twin culverts, lived a bull. He and a few scrawny chickens seemed to be the only nonhuman tenants of a farm on the skids. Its large barn was twisting dangerously on its foundation, like a set for some rural version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and there were never any people to be seen out-of-doors, though occasionally they would roar down the dirt road in large, antiquated cars. They did not slow down to wave to us.
The bull controlled his side of the marsh, which I would have been happy to leave to him except that there, just across the little bridge where dry land resumed, ran a wonderful road, actually the remains of an old railroad which had hauled away—hard now to believe—practically every tree in the region, late in the nineteenth century. The industry had ceased only because, after the clear-cutting, there was simply nothing left, though the train ran on, carrying lumbermen, till early in this century. The first owner of the camp was, in fact, a woman with a great fondness for lumberjacks; in those days there were no trees between the cabin and the tracks, and the story went that she’d hang out her laundry in the altogether just as the train went by, displaying her charms for the men en route. (She liked her whiskey, too; the woods turn up an inexhaustible supply of mossy bottles.) The railroad tracks and most of the ties are gone now, but the old bed winds on forever, through shady vales, past ferny cliffs of granite and deep, shadowy sloughs favored by moose, toward a number of small lakes. An old man who stopped his astonishingly decrepit army-green pickup on the road in front of the camp to talk to me one day told me a lovely story, about swimming with his Newfoundland dog in one of these ponds. He had been a teenager then, and had taken himself for a long, long hike across some trails we knew and some we did not, to arrive at a pond. Then he’d decided to swim across, and, in his exhaustion, something must have gone wrong. He came to some time later, on a large rock by the shore, the drenched Newfoundland towering over him; he had been rescued by the valiant pet.
Our noble pet seemed to lose his nerve in the presence of the bull; we’d carefully slink around the edge of his territory. Arden, never barking once, wouldn’t take his eyes off the bulk of the beast, standing spread-legged in his meadow, until we were well out of range. His caution turned out to be wise. One day, alone at the camp, Arden and I are walking down to look for beaver; the bull is himself out on the little road, near the bridge, and he decides that we have come quite close enough. He begins to walk toward us; I try acting nonchalant, but then decide that the appearance of fearlessness is an inadequate defense. We turn and begin to walk away, but hear behind us, gaining a little, the determined hoof steps of the bull. The bull is tall as me, wide as a small tractor, and horned. We
walk faster. The bull walks faster, too, and I begin to think this is serious. I’m unsure if he wants me or Arden or both of us, but by this time we’re both panicked and start to run full-tilt, which only seems to pique the bull’s interest. He chases us all the way up the road back to the camp, and Arden and I race into the house, and I slam the door behind us, my heart racing as if it’s about to burst, Arden panting and pacing. The bull stands in the road in front of the house, pawing the dirt, snorting, triumphant.
If Wally had experienced this, I don’t think he’d ever have come back to the camp again. Because, as we soon discovered, it was not really such a pleasure for him to be in the woods. He didn’t enjoy the operatic thunderstorms which the mountain was prone to; one June night lightning made a crater in the road the size of a Volkswagen. He felt isolated at night, disturbed by the noises of wildlife and the creak of trees, and the endless little rustlings of mice. Even though we’d found and dispersed the great granary they had made inside the wall of the attic, and even though we’d gone out of our way to keep everything edible covered and sealed, the mice were ineradicable, and Wally couldn’t sleep because he was sure they’d run across his arm, or he’d wake up with one sitting beside his head. The scuttle of feet on the floor in the dark didn’t bother me in the same way it did him; I don’t know if what he felt was a city boy’s anxiety about uncharted nature or something else, a displaced unsettledness? Perhaps it was a family trait; when his mother came to visit the camp, for an hour or two in broad daylight on a summer afternoon, she was noticeably anxious and in a hurry to leave. She was, it turned out, worried about bears.