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Uncommon Ground

JUST TO THE EAST of Beaver Brook, in an area known to geologists as the Schooly Penaplain, there is a low ridge that rises from the swampy shores of a small lake and runs south-southeast for half a mile or so. Coming on that place from any of the four quarters of the globe, you would not say that it was in any way unique. To the east, a patchwork of overgrown hay fields rolls up from the flood plain of the brook; to the west and south, sheep pastures, hay fields, and plots of vegetables rise to the forested higher ground; and on the north you can see a dark woods of oak and pine and hemlock. Except for the fact that the aspect of the place is generally rural and pleasing to the eye, the area is not unlike a thousand similar ridges that interlace the coastal plain of New England.

I once spent a year living in a small cottage I built on the eastern slope of that ridge. The place was hardly new territory for me; I had already lived on the hill for some fifteen years before I built my small house. But the more I got to know the land in that area, the more I walked the woods and the edges of the fields, the more the ridge drew me in. The place became a center for me, the very core of my personal universe; it seemed impossible for me to live a full life anywhere else. The world was unbounded there, as if all experience, all history, had somehow concentrated itself in this singular spot. I was forever stumbling on new adventures, new landscapes, and improbable occurrences. The ridge invited improbability.

In the woods behind my cottage the land broke into a series of small, angled valleys and deep hollows. Here, a century ago, there were three or four farms, and in the deeper woods I would find sad little remembrances of past lives—dooryard lilacs, beds of daffodils, irises, and lonely stands of poppies and peonies. I discovered running walls, old foundations, the skeletons of cars and farm wagons and hay rakes. There were owls and coyotes, foxes and eagles and hawks, and it seemed to me that even wilder things could be found if one bothered to look—fishers, bobcats, bears, perhaps even Indians. It was a haunted land, deserted now, unlived in, unloved, untracked, and as yet undiscovered by the working population of the community in which the ridge was located.

I used to have experiences in that forest that did not make sense, that didn’t mesh with our vision of the way the world is supposed to operate here in the rational, scientific West, Inside the depths of the woods things seemed to change overnight. An old wagon road at the bottom of the ridge, deserted since 1893, would alter its course of its own volition. A huge oak tree near the road would shift periodically and reappear somewhere else. There was an Indian burial ground among some boulders on the western slope of the ridge; people used to say that well into this century Pawtucket Indians could be seen in that part of the woods. The ghost of a soldier, slain in King Philip’s War in 1676, used to appear on the ridge. Once, a hundred and fifty years ago, the last bear in the region was killed in a hemlock grove on the north slope, not far from my cottage. It was said that after it died, it came to life again and, just before it expired for the second time, turned itself into an Indian.

I never knew who I would meet in the woods. Once, years ago, I encountered a man there who dressed in the skins and furs of wild animals and claimed to subsist by hunting and gathering. I would occasionally see a family of serious-looking people dressed in corduroy, picking mushrooms in the woods. They turned out to be Eastern Europeans, immigrants who maintained a self-sufficient small farm in a four-acre clearing just south of the lake. Nearby lived a woman who would always dress impeccably to do her gardening work and spoke with a clipped Anglo-American accent. Her land was a veritable Eden of blossoming flowers, trees, and shrubs; it used to be said in the town that she had the ability to make plants flourish by simply staring at them. Occasionally I would see her in the woods as well, always under unusual circumstances.

One afternoon in September I was crossing a meadow just below the hickory grove where I eventually built my cottage when I heard a tiny bell ring out from the grasses beside one of the stone walls that interlace the ridge. I listened for a second or two and then realized that the bell was nothing more than the singing of a meadow cricket, not an uncommon sound in September in this part of the world. But as I stood there, I noticed that other crickets were calling in the meadow, and that they were singing with far more intensity than they normally would do. The volume increased until the sound was almost deafening; the high, insistent ringing filled the space above the grasses; it shimmered in the upper air; it surged against the wall of woods beyond the stone walls and rolled back on itself. Crickets were everywhere; I had never heard such wild singing. And then, in the midst of this frenetic calling, the sun flashed and the forest wall turned an impenetrable black. I had a sense that something momentous was about to happen. The inner nature of the ridge, the nature of reality, perhaps, was about to reveal itself to me. In the dark interior of the woods I could see moving shapes. Birds flew past. Branches swayed in spite of the stillness, and I thought I saw something large rise up from behind the stone wall and lumber off into the obscurity of the deeper woods.

I went after it. I crossed the wall and walked a few yards into the trees; but as soon as I stepped into the shaded interior, the crickets in the meadow behind me fell silent. A long corridor of flat ground opened in front of me, carpeted with partridgeberry and mayflower, and at the end of the hall of trees I saw the figure of a woman in a print dress holding a white rabbit in her arms. She appeared to be fifty-five or sixty, and had her gray hair tied in a bun at the back of her neck. She turned and looked at me directly. Then she gathered her rabbit closer to her and walked away.

Or was that part of a dream I had? I was forever dreaming about the place, and sometimes I couldn’t be sure what was dream and what was real. I knew this woman—she was the gardener who lived on the other side of the ridge who could make things grow by staring at them. In a more rational world, or in a more rational place, she would have spoken to me. But then the ridge was out of step with time.

I did not set out to explore the mysteries of the place the year I lived there. What I really wanted to do was think. My wife and I had separated a year before I built my cottage, and for a while I had rented an apartment about three miles from the ridge. But life was dull there. I sometimes felt drained and unconnected. I would go back to the ridge and walk around, and I would always come away with a sense of energy and renewal. The place had power; there was something about it that nourished me. At the end of the year I decided to return and build a cottage in the woods, behind my old house. I could be closer to my two children by living on the ridge. I could be closer to the mysterious wooded slopes. Set back from lights and roads and noise, I could attain that singular state that is so hard to find in our time—solitude.

This move was not a new development in my life. From an early age I had planned to retire at twenty-seven to a small country village, there to watch the passage of the seasons and study the smaller details of life—the frogs and the crickets, the flights of migratory birds, and the blossoming of the forest. I took as my model for this the champions of the small life, Gilbert White in Selbourne, England, and closer to home, Henry Thoreau, who spent two years living by the side of Walden Pond in Concord, far enough from civilization to experience the adventure of living close to the natural world, but not so far away that he couldn’t walk home for dinner.

In some ways I had already achieved my goal. At age twenty-seven I had left New York City and had taken a job teaching little children about nature in a small town in northwestern Connecticut. After that I lived in Europe for a while, then on Martha’s Vineyard, and then I moved to the valley with the low ridge. These were all pleasant enough years, but there always seemed to be too many windows and walls between me and the natural world. What I needed, what I had always wanted, was a one-room cabin where I could wake up and step outside without getting dressed.

Once I had decided to build, I spent a lot of time on the back lot trying to choose the best possible place to site my cottage. I finally settled on a spot just beyond a small meadow, in the copse of young hickory trees, not far from the hemlock grove where the last bear in the valley was killed in 1811. The site had southern exposure, good winter sun, dappled shade in summer, and the bright, flowery expanse of the meadow to the southeast.

No one in the United States who decides to spend a year or so living in a cabin in the woods, watching the course of the seasons, does so without at least a nod to Henry Thoreau, and this experiment was to take place in the heart of Thoreau country, no more than sixteen miles from Walden Pond. I was working in Lincoln, Massachusetts, two miles from the site of Thoreau’s cabin, and regularly on clear days I would walk there. After a few years, almost in spite of myself, Henry began to insinuate himself into my life. One hundred and thirty years after his death he still had a presence in the area; I could not walk anywhere near Walden Pond without thinking about him. I began to read his works. I studied Walden; I read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and I delved into some of the editions of his journals. When I went to construct my small house, quite logically, I considered building a version of Henry’s cabin at Walden.

It seemed a propitious time to undertake such a project. Down at the Walden Pond Reservation the state government was in the process of constructing an exact replica of the cabin. I knew Roland Robbins, the man who had discovered the actual site of the cabin, and who was overseeing the construction of the replica. Robbins gave me a set of plans for Henry’s cabin and encouraged me to use them. But studying the spare, hard lines, I began to wonder whether I really wanted such a place. My tastes in architecture (not to mention world views) differed from Henry’s. The cloistered, spartan life led by Thoreau, while attractive in a theoretical way, did not quite match my semicivilized style. Furthermore, I had to face certain significant realities. Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately and confront only the essential things in life. I went there because my wife and I had separated and the woods were the only place I could find affordable housing.

In addition to Thoreau’s works, I had been reading those of Andrew Jackson Downing, an American landscape architect of the mid-nineteenth century who had written two books on house and garden design. Although he and Henry were contempoaries, Downing was the antithesis of Thoreau in architectural tastes, favoring elaborately decorated Victorian structures. Even before I read any of his books in depth I had come to appreciate Downing’s designs, and I decided to build a house based on one of his gardener’s cottages. It would be about the size of Henry Thoreau’s cabin, ten feet by sixteen, but it would have board and batten siding, a steeply pitched Gothic roof, and a lot of gingerbread trim. The cottage quite suited my own philosophy of land use, which falls somewhere between the managed gardens of Andrew Jackson Downing and the wild, untamed nature of Henry Thoreau.

I drew up some rough plans; I bought the lumber from a local sawmill, one of the oldest continuously operating mills in the country. I purchased the nails, roofing, and other materials from the hardware store, and I began to search for used doors and windows. From a massive Georgian structure that was in the process of being refurbished, I managed to salvage some elegant narrow windows; I found heavy yellow pine French doors at a barn sale and some beautifully fashioned porch rails at a house that was being torn down. Finally, with all the materials more or less on the site, I began to build.

This dream of building a house of one’s own is very nice in theory. But in fact, building is a maddening process. It requires a certain amount of skill in measuring. You have to handle cumbersome, dangerous tools. You are forever tripping over things, losing essential equipment, barking your knuckles, and lifting objects that are too heavy. I had had some experience in light construction. I once built a porch; I had made a greenhouse and a chicken house; but I would never in all the world claim to be skilled in carpentry. In fact I hate heavy work; I simply build things because it is often easier to do it oneself than to hire someone else. Fortunately, for this project, which was by far my most ambitious, I had help.

I had a friend named Higgins who lived on the banks of the Nashua River in Groton in a former stable, which he and his paramour, Jane, had retrofitted into a comfortable little yachtlike house. Higgins had a variety of talents. He had worked as a backup musician, a yacht captain, a tow-boat operator, and, for a while, as a reader for a publishing company. He was also a carpenter. When I began thinking about building a house on my own, I called him for help, and with Higgins as a resource, I slowly came to understand the intricacies of the process.

One afternoon in early March he and I laid out the square for the foundation posts on the site I had selected in the hickory grove at the top of the ridge. That done, Higgins retired to other projects, and I spent one whole day digging the four holes, four feet deep, as he had directed. Higgins came back for a few hours one afternoon and helped me lay out the sills, and he returned on another day and showed me how to set up the frames for the ground floor, although I had to do most of the heavy work myself. The house was a sort of modified post and beam. I built frames for the ground-floor walls on the deck Higgins and I had constructed, and then, struggling mightily by myself, forced, pushed, hoisted, and otherwise raised the whole end of the house into place and temporarily nailed it with supports. It took me a day to raise the two gable ends, another to construct the two side walls, and a third to get them up and nailed in place. The whole boxlike affair was horribly unstable and rickety, but Higgins assured me that the frame would tighten up as the building progressed.

The project went slowly. I was working daily at my regular job, and I was taking care of my children while my erstwhile wife was in the process of launching herself in a new career. I was also, somewhat vainly, still attempting to enjoy the glorious spring that was by that time sweeping across the ridge. By mid-May, however, I was ready to put up the rafters. Higgins came back one weekend and taught me how to select the proper angle for the roof without using complicated mathematical formulas. We simply laid the actual rafters down on the deck; I chose an angle that I felt best suited the Gothic style of the house, and we cut them on the ground and nailed them together. That done, the two of us set about the precarious task of hoisting the rafters onto the ground-floor framework and setting them in place.

For all his skills Higgins is not good at math and measuring. Neither am I, and at one point we discovered (he discovered, to be more accurate) that we had miscalculated and somehow skewed the rafters by an inch or two. Since the whole frame would eventually be covered in ceiling material, and since the error would not affect the strength of the cottage, we carried on. All day and into the next, balancing ourselves on my swaying, unstable frame, we nailed rafters in place. When it was completed, at the end of that weekend, I could see for the first time what my cottage would actually look like. Higgins and I walked down the little driveway I had cut through the pine woods and looked back up the hill through the trees. There it was, a tiny chapel-like structure, standing alone among the hickories, the sassafras trees, and the white pines.

Higgins christened it “The Vicarage.”

“I’ll be back for vespers,” he said.

I didn’t expect him to return; he had done enough already, and he was one of those people who always take on more projects than they have time for. Once, twenty years earlier, I had worked on a boat with Higgins. He was first mate, and I was a lowly deckhand. He tried his best to snarl and act the part of a proper seafaring man, but I recognized in him a gentle soul, and we became fast friends in spite of our unequal rank. He knocked about in boats for years after that first summer, and then, horrified by the decline in interesting sailboats, put the proverbial oar on his shoulder and walked inland until someone asked him what that thing was. And there he settled, never again to go to sea.

Actually, he ended up in Groton because Jane lived there. They had known each other on Martha’s Vineyard, which she had left some years earlier to go to film school. She was now a free-lance film editor, and, more to the point, she had been given an old stable not far from the Nashua River, a perfect place for Higgins to bide his time. One thing led to another; they fell in love (again) and set up housekeeping in the stable one summer while they fixed the place up. After three years the former stable had become a warren of hidden sleeping lofts, libraries, tiny pantries, and catwalks.

Higgins did come back again to help me with the roof. Together we planked the steeply pitched rafters and then, since time was running short for Higgins, we began shingling even before the side walls were built. Originally Higgins had tried to talk me into using cedar shingles, but I was running out of money by then as well as time. My self-imposed deadline of June 21 was closing in.

Still, things were moving along. Even though it had no walls, the house now kept out rain; it had the feel of a gazebo or a Japanese teahouse set at the edge of a mysterious wood. Over the next month I constructed the frames for the windows and doors, then planked up the sides and nailed battens along the seams in the popular Victorian style of Andrew Jackson Downing’s designs. Working alone now, without the benefit of my mentor, I made slower progress but managed well enough. I could now actually see what had to be done, rather than conceptualize imaginary angles and shapes. I still had to measure, however, and I spent an inordinate amount of time cutting and recutting boards because of my incompetence at fractions.

One day in June I hung the French door. The house looked completed, and in fact I could have moved in, but there was a lot more to do. Using a borrowed saw, I cut filigreed bargeboards for the gable ends of the roof. I built tiny, Gothic-style trim boards for the many windows, and sawed out a decorative swan and nailed it above the front door. Once these important details were completed, once the floor was sanded and varnished and the windows screened and the front porch constructed, I was ready to take up residence.

I collected some of my favorite possessions: an antique parlor organ, a bed that had belonged to one of my brothers in his youth, a little desk I had grown up with, a few books, a mandolin, an antique French flute my mother gave me for my thirtieth birthday, paintings by my eldest brother, and old family photographs my father had taken during cruises on the Chesapeake Bay in the 1920s. My house in order, there could be no further delays, and right on schedule, on a sultry midsummer evening that smelled of soil and roses, I moved in.