Beside the Green Meadow
BY EARLY JULY the forest and the fields surrounding the cottage were flourishing with a sustained vigor. Bird song was never so charged, the woods never so lush and sweet-smelling nor so alive with insect life. Butterflies drifted over the open areas; the meadow crickets began calling; the leaves were full, the grasses green and water-filled; and the buds of field wildflowers, which all through June had been swelling and filling, were in bloom.
Nowhere was this vigor of summer life more apparent than in the meadow beyond the stone terrace of my cottage. Just to the south of the house, rolling to the southeast in an easy slope, was a cleared area of an acre and a half, which, by early summer, had become a veritable jungle of grasses. I once counted some twenty different herbaceous plants growing there. On another occasion I discovered twelve dew-bejeweled webs of the orb web weaver spider glistening in the morning sun. I used to lie there on those spacious, early summer afternoons surrounded by the wall of woods and watch the wild sky play out its cloudscape overhead, and sometimes I would fall into a sort of reverie in which the restrictions of space would dissolve, and I would feel myself transported. Given a little leap of faith, I could imagine myself in some high pasture undisturbed by time and the twentieth century. There were periods when I would spend the entire day simply staring at things, rising occasionally to move my chair to some more favored spot in the meadow, following the sun and thinking vaguely that, sometime, I should get up and do something.
Five years before I moved to my cottage, the meadow was a pine forest, an entirely different and, in many ways, less appealing place—dark, rank with poison ivy, and essentially devoid of wildlife. In a survey that I made when the area was wooded with trees, I counted a patch of Canada mayflower, a few cucumber roots, and a great deal of poison ivy. Birds avoided the place, and only one mammal, a gray squirrel, nested there. Some forty years earlier the pine woods had been an orchard. In among the dark pines I could still see the decaying trunks of old apple trees. In its declining years, part of the orchard had been used as a dump by a family named Case who lived in the old house below the meadow, and before that the orchard had been a pasture for the family cow. Before the coming of the white man three centuries ago, the place had probably been forested with oak or white pine, the trees that make up the climax forest in this part of the world.
I have the more recent history of the area on the authority of a man named George Case, who appeared at the doorstep of my cottage that summer and explained that he had once lived on this land. Case’s father had left home when George was about eight years old, and his mother moved her three children around from house to house until finally, in 1925, she restored her maiden name and moved back to her family home in Littleton. The Case house was small; downstairs there was a living room, a tiny birthing room where old man Case and his wife slept, and a kitchen wing. The upstairs was partitioned into several little cabinetlike rooms where various children of the extended family bedded down. By the late 1920s seven people were living in what was, in essence, a five-room house.
Old man Case, George’s grandfather, was a sometime farmer who supplemented his income by working in a webbing mill in town. He kept a white horse in the apple orchard, had a pig, a flock of hens, and a noisy rooster named Fred. George and his cousins used to ride the white horse bareback around the apple orchard, but it was only half tame and would try to scrape the children off its back by galloping under low branches. The children became adept riders, wheeling off to the side and clinging to the horse’s neck and body Indian fashion to avoid the trunks and limbs. On so small a farm there was not much work for the children to do, and whenever they couldn’t catch the horse, they would wander the land around the house looking for excitement. George had a lot of stories about the forested ridge beyond the meadow, and, as we sat drinking coffee on the stone terrace in front of my cottage, he recounted them. Much of what he told me I had heard before, but I liked his slow, dreamy delivery.
One night, he told me, he and his cousins had slept out in the woods behind the orchard. They made a campfire and posted a guard to watch through the night, each taking turns.
“I’m sitting there on watch,” he said, “and I hear this crunch, like a guy walking. I look up and I see this Indian with a spear standing there. Long leggings, bare chested. When he sees me look up at him, he bares his teeth and hisses, like a bat or something. I don’t mind telling you I pissed my pants.”
George screamed. His cousins woke up, searched the forest with flashlights and torches, but found nothing.
“But I’m telling you that I saw that Indian as clear as I see you now. Clearer, maybe. That was fifty years ago and I haven’t forgotten yet.”
The year he turned sixteen, shortly after the stock market crashed, George and one of his cousins knotted some sheets together, lowered themselves out an upstairs window, and hit the road. They ended up riding the rails to Oregon, found work as timber cutters, and after knocking about in various logging camps eventually settled down there. George married, continued to work for timber companies, and led an uneventful life, no doubt by choice; he had moved enough during his youth. This was his first trip back east since he had run away in 1930, and as we walked the land, he stared silently and shook his head in disbelief. “I remember good times here,” he said at one point. What impressed him most was the pine forest just south of the meadow. The land had been a sunny field when he ran away; now it was penumbral and ominous.
A more natural man than myself—Henry Thoreau, for example—would have luxuriated in the return of the white pine forest. In Henry’s time nearly 85 percent of New England was open fields, so it is little wonder that the forest fascinated him. In my time that statistic has reversed. Several years before I moved into the cottage I concluded that it would be a good thing to cut down the pine trees that had grown up on that part of my land and restore the pasture. My wife and I had met a woman who had a timber-cutting operation in which she used not heavy equipment—skidders, cherry pickers, and bulldozers—but mules, and when I decided to clear the pines, I called her up and struck a deal. She would leave me the hardwood for my woodpile and take the pine for herself to sell to a lumber company. It was a pretty even trade as far as I could calculate.
This mule-driving woman was not, as you might imagine, a raw-boned Amazon. She was about thirty years old, of medium build, with clear, soft skin and a mane of chestnut hair that she often wore in a single long braid. She was married to a timber operator who occasionally worked with her, but mostly she ran the business herself, marking the trees, cutting and trimming them, and then setting the tackle for her mules to drag the cut timber out of the forest to a loading area. She loved her mules with that kind of respectful love one might have for a large and powerful, perhaps slow-witted, child. She used to ride them, and in fact was a member of a hunt club in a nearby town, where she would appear among the properly attired huntsmen with their expensive horses and dogs on her favorite mule, Tulip, a great giant of a thing with ridiculous crooked ears. Once mounted she was one with her mule, a little like a female centaur. One day, while I was dozing against a tree in a park, I saw her storm past, surrounded by a motley crew of hounds. She had let her hair out of its braid, and she thundered by me like a Valkyrie, the ground shaking under the hoofbeats of her mule.
For a while she worked as the dog warden for the town, and during that time was given charge of a full-blooded wolf that had been confiscated from someone in the state. She used to run the wolf on a long lead through the woods around Walden Pond and the town of Lincoln, and I would sometimes come across her, trotting along in her jogging shoes, with a huge yellow-eyed wolf at the end of a long tether. I got to know her wolf. It was the most terrified, timid thing I have ever met, shying away to the end of its lead whenever I stopped to talk.
Laura, the mule woman, arrived to clear my land with her mules and two male helpers. The men set to work immediately, felling trees, while Laura walked her team up the ridge to the area that was being cleared. She trimmed a couple of fallen pines, chained them together, and then hooked the chain to the mules and walked with them back to the road. Once she had repeated this procedure a few times, the mules had learned the routine. They would haul the logs down to the landing and wait there for Laura to come and unhook them.
What I had planned was essentially a clear cut, an anathema to some environmentalists. I intended to take out virtually every tree inside the three stone walls that surrounded the lot on the south, west, and north. The idea was to recreate the pasture of the late nineteenth century. But once the actual cutting started, I began to have some reservations about what we were doing to the forest. What right did I have to cut down innocent pine trees that had lived longer than I, and whose ancestors had been living in the area for some eight thousand years? Given the retreat of open land in New England in the present century and the return of the white pine forest, I had rationalized that cutting over a mere two acres of this overbearing, dismal woods to let in light and restore some of the nineteenth-century landscape would be a good thing. By clearing a small patch of land in the midst of a great sea of forest, I was creating an edge, a place for grass and herbaceous plants to grow, which would attract and provide food for birds, mammals, and insects.
Nevertheless, I watched with remorse as the mules hauled out the first of the tall fifty-year-old pines, brutally stripped of their feathery branches, quartered into movable pieces, and ignominiously stacked beside the road to be carried away and turned into—what? Boxes? Two-by-four studs that would be buried in the walls of some suburban tract house? My remorse deepened as the forest diminished, and when the two-acre lot became, in the space of a few days, nothing but an open, raw-looking wasteland with neat piles of brush stacked here and there, I had the sense of having done something horribly wrong and irrevocable.
Once the mill operator had hauled away the pine and the hardwood was cut, split, and stacked, I had to decide what to do with my clear cut. For a year I simply let the land heal, and I was surprised to see how quickly it recovered. A lot of poison ivy had been growing in the pine woods and along the stone walls, and as soon as there was a clearing, it began to spread furiously, along with blackberry, grass, cinquefoil, and goldenrod. By the end of that summer healthy young plants were growing everywhere. This was good for most of the local wildlife, and I felt somewhat vindicated for my rash act of tearing down the forest, even though the new growth made the place almost impassable for human beings.
Apart from the rank thicket of brambles and poison ivy, there were four unsightly piles of brush and stumps in the clearing—not exactly what I had had in mind for my meadow—so I gave up on all natural solutions and called in my archenemy, the bulldozer. In a single day a big yellow monster, in the hands of a grizzled man named Jim, dug out the stumps, buried them along with the slash, shifted a few boulders for me, and in the process ground down, uprooted, or otherwise destroyed the full two acres of blackberries and poison ivy. When he finally left, a peaceful silence descended over the clearing.
I let the area grow up again. First to return were the poison ivy shoots and the blackberries, which, although ground down to nothing on the surface, had their roots deeply set in the topsoil. But this time other species came along as well, and by the end of that growing season the lot showed more diversity of plant life than it had had in perhaps its entire previous history. Toward the end of that summer I counted the number of species in my first informal ecological survey. In subsequent years in the meadow I found brown snakes, red-bellied snakes, garter snakes, and milk snakes. I saw leopard frogs, pickerel frogs, wood frogs and toads, red-backed salamanders, katydids, meadow crickets, long-horned grasshoppers, and uncountable species of beetles. Foxes and skunks regularly crossed the meadow; deer grazed there; juncos, whitethroats, song sparrows, and tree sparrows garnered the weed seeds in autumn and winter. Robins and flickers were abundant; flycatchers darted from the trees along the edges to snap up the field insects flying above the ground; swallows coursed the clearing by day, followed by bats at night. There was light and air; stars, wind, and sky; life had returned.
I was not leading an entirely monastic life at my cottage in the woods. About a year before I moved in I had met a woman named Jill Brown who had recently separated from her husband, as I had from my wife. We used to go out to lunch together to commiserate. Then we began going out to dinner, and then we began going out in earnest. She smelled vaguely of cinnamon, and had a passion for French; she used to quote long, sad passages from Baudelaire. On weekends we would often go to concerts together, and during the week we would wander around looking for adventure. One evening in early July she and I were poking around the back streets of Concord looking at flower gardens and daydreaming of an orderly life, as compared to the disorderly one we seemed to be leading. We were passing along a picket fence when it suddenly struck me that we should visit Thoreau’s grave. It was more than a thought; it was an imperative, something we had to do that very day.
In spite of the fact that I used to visit Walden Pond regularly, and in spite of my increasing interest in Henry and his way of life, I had yet to visit the spot on Authors’ Ridge where he is buried, alongside Emerson, Alcott, and other luminaries of Concord.
We walked back through the center of town and out to the east, to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. This was the most pleasant of summer evenings; an immense colony of swifts had nested in the chimneys of an insurance company near the town center, and as we passed, they were coming in to roost. They made a vast swirling funnel above the roof, circling like a storm and filling the air with their loud chattering as they prepared to enter the chimneys for the night. They were the only sign of life at that hour; the streets were curiously empty, the shops closed and sad. We walked up through the darkening grounds of the cemetery and then climbed the steep, short hill to the ridge and the grave sites.
Quite fittingly, Henry was buried without pomp among the members of his family. Central in the grouping of gravestones is the marker for his mother and father, who are surrounded by their four children, all of whom died without issue. Even though the stone itself was indistinguishable from the others, Henry’s grave stood out. Pilgrims had been there before us that day and had laid bunches of flowers at his tombstone, while the other small markers were barren. We stood there for a while, thinking about the family.
The sun had long since set, but a warm, smoky light held in the sky above the trees. Under the branches, on the hill, and among the surrounding monuments there was a cathedral-like gloom. I read the simple inscription on Henry’s gravestone: “Henry D. Thoreau July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862.”
“What is the date today?” I asked Jill.
“July twelfth,” she said.
I began to suspect that this Henry Thoreau was becoming more entwined with my life than I wanted.
On July 4, 1845, the year he turned twenty-eight, Henry moved into his house at Walden Pond. He borrowed a wagon from a friend, loaded it with his few earthly belongings, and hauled everything out through the woods to the door of his newly constructed dwelling. He did not own much. As he tells us in Walden, he had at the cabin a table, a bed, three chairs, a three-inch looking glass, and a tent, which he kept rolled in the loft. He also had three plates, a cup, a spoon, two knives and forks, a japanned lamp, a flute, a kettle, a skillet, a dipper, and a washbowl. He brought with him a few cherished books, including his copy of The Iliad, and some lighter reading.
The cabin was not actually completed when he moved in. The walls had yet to be plastered, and there were wide chinks between the secondhand boards he had used for siding. He claimed to enjoy the flow of air through these chinks, although he does not tell us what he did about the infernal New England mosquito.
July in New England lends itself to outdoor living. Henry had yet to build his fireplace, and he did virtually all his cooking over a campfire outside his front door. When it rained, he constructed a shelter over the fire and went right on baking. He loved bread, and he tried various experiments with different grains until he found the proper combination. He ate sparsely, swam regularly, roamed the nearby forest, chased foxes, and lived, as he says, close to the bone. It was an intense, focused life, stripped of luxury.
He got his water for drinking and washing from Walden Pond. He would also bathe there, sometimes twice a day, once just after he woke up and once after he had finished working in his nearby bean field. Presumably he washed his few dishes there as well. Somewhere near his cabin he had a privy, although as one of his biographers, Walter Harding, points out, he was too prudish, even in his wild, elemental state of mind, to tell us anything about it.
After his morning bath Henry would meditate on his natural surroundings and then tend the bean field he had planted, or continue in his meditations. In the field he would work barefoot until the day grew hot and the sandy soil burned his feet. Then he would wander off into the forest looking for plants and animals, and sometimes spend the rest of the day there, observing the diversity of the natural world. Later in his life, after he left Walden, he would become more methodical about these observations, more scientific, but at this point he seemed simply in awe of things. Every day he wrote in the journal he had begun in 1837, and it is the record of these days—the thoughts, the observations, and the accounts of his small adventures—that became the core of Walden.
Often in the afternoon he would walk to Concord, there to catch up on the news, which, from the comfortable distance of his Walden retreat, he was able to view with some remove. Any more involvement in daily life might have oppressed him. He would talk to townspeople, visit his family and friends, and often stay for dinner, either with his mother and sisters or with the Emersons.
After dinner he would walk home to Walden through the darkened woods. He grew to love these lonely, homeward-bound passages, the mist and dankness of the night woods, the darkness of the forest. He would feel his way between the trees, sensing, rather than seeing, the soft path.
His was an idyllic existence, the model balance between sociability and privacy, with space enough to think and feel and write. The idea of Thoreau as a loner, an eccentric, is more the result of nineteenth-century rumors about him than actual fact. Although he was criticized by uncomprehending townspeople, he was not friendless, he was not alone, and he was not a drunk, as was commonly believed among the less-educated people of Concord. Furthermore, he was happy. He lived between two worlds, a city of muskrats to the south and, to his north, the town of Concord. He would visit both to observe the inhabitants, and, although he was critical of men and not of muskrats, he clearly enjoyed the spectacle of the town. He was no mountain man, this Henry Thoreau. He was a literate American, a social critic, and he needed a village.
Henry seems to have lacked direction in his early life. All things fascinated him equally. He was an inveterate researcher; he filled his journals with notes on trees, fruits, fish, geology, measurements, Indians, travels, people, and almost anything else he came across, but it was not clear to what end he was working.
Henry never fit in very well with his schoolmates in Concord, and he was something of an outsider at Harvard. When he graduated in 1837, jobs were hard to come by in Concord, but he was lucky and managed to land a teaching position at the local school. He lasted two weeks.
Henry and his brother, John, who was also a teacher, had ideas about education that were unusual for their time. Henry brought some of these views with him to the public school system. He was opposed to corporal punishment, for example, and did not, as was the custom in those times, thrash his pupils. The school officials, hearing about this odd behavior, made a visit and directed him to beat the students. So Henry lined them up, arbitrarily selected a few, and thrashed them. Then he quit.
A year later, in 1838, he and his brother started a school in Concord, one that shunned corporal punishment and followed an experimental curriculum that involved outdoor excursions. But after three years, partly because John fell ill, they closed the school, and Henry left teaching forever.
Always adept in the practical arts, after his school failed he helped his family improve its pencil-making business, and by the 1840s he had totally refurbished the operation so that it was one of the most profitable and prominent pencil factories in the East. But Henry had no abiding interest in manufacturing or business. What he really wanted to do was write.
He had written essays in college, and for years had fancied himself something of a poet, but he had had little published and had made virtually no money. In the spring of 1843, at the urging of his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he went to New York City to try to establish himself. But that, too, failed, and in the fall he was back home in Concord, never again to leave for any length of time.
He worked in his family’s pencil factory the following year. He also wrote in his journals, took his walks, and occasionally went on excursions with his friends. On one of them, a boating trip up the Sudbury River, he and a companion accidentally started a forest fire that burned over the precious wood lots of several local farmers. By this time Henry had a reputation in Concord: a Harvard man who had never held a regular job, a writer who did not earn money for his efforts, a malingerer, an eccentric, a nature lover, and now a fire starter. And then, as if to confirm all the rumors, in the spring of 1845 Henry commenced the most rash act of his life.
For several years he had felt that what he needed to become a writer was time and space. He had thought about building a small cabin on the shores of Flint’s Pond (now Sandy Pond) in Lincoln, but old man Flint, the owner of the pond, had refused to allow him to live there. In the hope of encouraging Henry in his writing career, Emerson offered to let him use some land he owned by the side of Walden Pond. Henry’s move to Walden on July 4, 1845, marked the beginning of his career. It also marked the foundation of a philosophy.
Thoreau was not the first to live apart in order to delve into the heart of things, but he became the prototype for those who followed him. One does not live alone in a cabin in the woods and escape comparison with this man; and the longer I lived in my little Gothic cottage, the more I tried to counter his pure, spartan existence, the more I noticed that I too was under his influence. The trouble with Henry Thoreau is that, in so many ways, he got there first.
I found myself following a pattern that recalled Henry’s. I would rise early in the morning and watch the unfolding of the dawn. These were for me, as they were for him, the finest hours of the day. Morning ablutions for me, however, were not quite so simple as they were for Mr. Thoreau. I was not so fortunate as to have a pond at my front door, although from time to time on hot mornings I would run down through the woods below my house and jump into Beaver Brook, which slides east below the ridge on which my house was perched. Washing myself and my dishes was slightly more complicated than it was, probably, for Henry. I rigged a primitive plumbing system in the cottage by installing a large water container in the loft and then running a pipe down to the kitchen corner, where I kept a small camp stove and a large copper urn to hold water. I would haul the water to the house in five-gallon jerry cans and horse them up the ladder to the loft to fill the tank. This primitive system of running water became something of an attraction. Visiting children, who in their daily lives would rarely drink anything as boring as water, would regularly draw off a cup from my copper urn. There is something fascinating about simplicity. Children know that. So did Henry.
Showers were another matter, as were regular meals. I commonly cadged both at Jill’s house, from other friends, or at my old house. That year, once my erstwhile wife took up her new career, my child-care responsibilities increased dramatically. During the week I would often cook dinner for my children and myself at my wife’s house. Weekends I got in the habit of eating breakfast at my cottage, followed by a walk in the nearby woods and fields. I would also hold alfresco dinners for friends in my meadow, and on some evenings we would sit there late into the night, talking, slapping at mosquitoes, and watching the fireflies and the stars.
I got a lot of advice from well-meaning friends after I moved into my cottage. Some suggested I run a wire up from my old house and install electricity. My brother Jim thought it would be a simple matter to run a garden hose up the hill to supply myself with running water. One person suggested, before I built, that I should simply get a trailer and park it in the woods. One of my constant advisers in matters of survival was a man named Mason who lived in the nearby town of Carlisle. He had fitted his house with a number of ingenious alternative devices for supplying himself with running water and electricity without reliance on the local light and water companies. Mason was an intermediary between the third world and the industrialized world. Lanky, with silky reddish-blond hair, habitually dressed in cotton or wool, he had a viewpoint on everything, including how to live in my house.
We took a walk together one day out to the hemlock grove behind the house. On the way back we passed a small, temporary wetland not far from my cottage. He halted and dug a hole with a stick.
“You know, you could drill a good shallow well by hand right here,” he said. “You could have running water. For that matter you could have hot water. You run the water into the house, fork the pipes, run one section through copper tubing wrapped around your stovepipe, set it up with a tank, and you’ll have hot water all winter.”
“What will draw the water up from the well?” I asked.
“Electricity.”
“But I don’t have electricity.”
“Get a bank of car batteries,” he said. “Once a week or so you carry one out and get it charged while the others do the work. You could get car radios for your house, speakers, lights. You could even get a TV.”
“Well, that’s great,” he said. “That’s cool. I don’t want one either. But if I did . . .”
Briefly, very briefly, I had considered the idea of trying to live a true back-to-the-land, self-sufficient way of life. The land certainly would have been able to sustain me. I had at least two arable acres, a small woodlot that could have provided a continuous supply of firewood, and, perhaps most important, I had the model of the past. For who knows how many generations, people who had lived in the immediate area not only had fed themselves by farming but also had grown enough to make a decent living. There were a couple of obstacles to my doing so, however, the main one being personality. I once read a profile of the successful self-sufficient farmer, and he or she (usually both, working as a team) turned out to be the opposite of me. The ones who succeeded, according to the survey, were introverted, somewhat antisocial, more comfortable with machines than with people, happy to work long, lonely hours all day. I loved working the land, growing flowers and vegetables, lonely dawns, hand tools and hard work, and a few introspective hours every day. But I also had come to cherish the diversity of the human community in urban areas, which is why I ended up outside Boston instead of in Alaska.
Once, during the early 1970s, because of energy shortages, I attempted to live in a largely self-sufficient way. I had a large garden filled with staples such as corn, peas, and potatoes; I had a fine fat pig, a flock of good hens, asparagus beds, row upon row of herbs of all varieties, plus the usual staples such as cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes. I even grew rye and buckwheat one year and ground my own flour. It was a tidy little system, but it was hard work, and after a couple of years I noticed that a curious change had come over me. Before this experiment I used to revel in all kinds of weather. I would go out in sleet and snow; I loved to walk in rain; I enjoyed bad weather and would swelter with pleasure in prolonged, cricket-loud droughts. But once I started growing things seriously, I began to worry about the weather. I would feel uncomfortable in drought; I came to hate bean-soaking, fungus-nourishing rainy seasons; I watched the sky fanatically. In short, I stopped enjoying nature. By the time I built my cottage I had learned my lesson. I planted and weeded my flowers and vegetables and let the season decide which would live and which would die.
During those years when I had conducted my experiment in self-sufficiency, I became interested in appropriate technology. I had met a man named Charles MacArthur, who had concerned himself with energy conservation issues since the early 1960s—long before they became fashionable. He was forever organizing events to advertise the efficiency of alternative energy systems. One such event was a car race in which the winner was not the first to cross the line but the one who covered a given distance with the least expenditure of energy.
Among Charles MacArthur’s many abiding interests were toilets. He was one of the first in this country to install the Swedish Clivus Multrum composting toilet in his house, and he had had a number of run-ins with boards of health because the toilets were not technically legal, according to local bylaws. Some years ago MacArthur moved his small-scale technology operation from Connecticut to Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. He bought a defunct mill, put it back into operation, and began supplying electricity to himself, as well as to the town.
Long before he moved to Maine, as a part of his research on composting toilets, he and an associate at the Smithsonian Institution ran across a set of nineteenth-century patents for an English device known as Moule’s earth closet. This ingenious toilet was simplicity itself. It was a box about four feet by four feet with a seat on top and a door in the back which opened onto a bin located below the seat. The system ran not on water but on peat moss. After using the toilet, one simply emptied a few cupfuls of peat into the box. Periodically the peat had to be extracted and composted for eight weeks or so. After that the compost could be reused in the bin, or used to fertilize a garden. MacArthur found that these toilets had been in use for a time in this country, and that they had worked. So he built one.
I saw his earth closet once in Dover-Foxcroft, in a museum of modern and nineteenth-century energy-efficient and water-conserving designs that he kept in his mill; it was one of his prize displays. Somewhat to my horror, he opened the bin of the toilet he had designed (and used), picked up the compost in his hands, crumbled it, and invited me to smell it. It had a rich, earthy smell, a little like the soil in a freshly turned garden.
Although he knew the earth closet had been sold in the United States, MacArthur was unable to find an original. He searched antique stores and museums, and while he found thousands upon thousands of chamber pots in all manner of fanciful designs, he could not locate an earth closet.
There were a number of outbuildings connected to MacArthur’s mills, and one day he decided to clear out one of the buildings to make room for a new project. Amid the clutter of nineteenth-century paraphernalia he found a hinged box that had once carried a high varnish. The thing looked suspiciously familiar to him, so he cleaned it up. Beneath the layers of caked soot and grime, he found the brand name written in that elegant false hand-lettering of nineteenth-century advertisements: “Moule’s Earth Closet.”
Toilets have never overly fascinated me, but this story of MacArthur’s earth closet stuck in my mind, and shortly after I moved into my cottage, I constructed one of my own. At one end of an earth-floored lean-to in back of the house, I dug a shallow pit in the soft piney soil. I built a box with a side door over this pit and lined it with peat moss and lime to make my very own outdoor version of Moule’s earth closet. I never told the board of health about this. The earth closet was probably as illegal as Charles MacArthur’s Clivus Multrum had been back in Connecticut. But it worked better than many of the septic systems in the town, which, whenever it rained, spewed a noisome effluvium onto lawns and streets. I had to clean out my earth closet only twice that year. I turned the compost into the garden, and in the rich humus I grew a rank garden of cosmos, stock, cleome, snapdragons, and perennials.
I used to spend a lot of time in the mornings and then again in the evenings working in the garden. Living outdoors as I was, I gained a new appreciation of the subtle beauties of the change from day to night; the lonely, sparkling song of the wood thrushes and the veeries; the soft light, the fading colors. Often, after it was too dark to work in the garden, I would sit on my front porch and watch the display of the rising fireflies above the meadow. They made bright sparks against the black background of the night forest, brighter, it seemed to me, than anywhere else in the world, except, perhaps, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I first watched them.
My father liked fireflies. We used to spend summers on the Eastern Shore at a rambling nineteenth-century summer house known as the Reed’s Creek place. It was set in the middle of a small grove of cedars and was surrounded by hay fields that rolled down to a wide creek where we kept a number of boats and a swimming dock. Often in the evening my father would go out onto the verandah on the west side of the house and sit in a rocking chair to watch the fireflies rise over the hay fields. He would reminisce about the Orient at these times and would often tell us the Japanese fairy tale of Princess Firefly. According to the legend, she was the most beautiful princess in the kingdom of the insects and had many suitors, none of whom she fancied. In order to hold them at bay, she announced that she would marry the one who was able to bring her a light that could match her own brilliance, and so all the lowly suitors rushed off to burning lights to try to steal fire. To this day they can be seen, still battering themselves against the light, still hopeful, after all these centuries.
No doubt my father picked up this story from the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, who was one of the foremost interpreters of Japanese culture and the first person to collect the disparate folk tales and legends of Japan. While he was in the Orient, and perhaps even before, my father began reading Lafcadio, and years later, when he returned from the East and went on to graduate studies in English, he wrote his thesis on Lafcadio Hearn’s fascination with the supernatural. It was an odd choice. Lafcadio was a gifted linguist, a skilled translator, intensely interested in exotic cultures, in the mystic, the sensuous, in folklore, nature, and the dark side of human experience. My father, although fluent in Chinese, was not particularly interested in language, folklore, mysticism, or nature. His Protestant religion was decidedly earthly; he was far more involved with people than transcendent spiritual experiences. And yet there was something of the exotic Lafcadio within him, some of which he managed to pass on to me. Part of this I may have absorbed from the collection of Hearn’s works that I tried to read while growing up. Some of it may have sunk in during those lingering evenings on the night porches of the Eastern Shore while the starlike bursts of the fireflies flashed over the summer hay fields.
Even there, however, on those peaceful evenings, my father’s voice would occasionally deepen into other tones, and we would know that we were about to be reminded of some tragedy—the plight of the Jews, the poverty of the Chinese, or the devastating power of the nuclear weapons that even then, in the innocence of the 1950s, seemed to him to be threatening the world.