Losing the Garden

Well, I can only teach you two things—to dig,
and to love your home. These are the true ends of philosophy.

Guests often asked if I found it hard to cook on a woodstove and live without running water. My answer was, not at all. We’re all just creatures of habit, I’d explain; it was just a matter of getting used to a different habit. Of course it all went much deeper. Living the way we chose to live was much more than setting up different routines for cooking and doing the dishes afterward. But that was the part that was harder to explain to visitors. I didn’t understand it that well myself.

“I’ve found someone who will play in the woods with me,” Guy often told guests. He believed if you could turn your grown-up work into the kind of play you played as a child, you could make a satisfying life. He’d gesture toward the root system of a hemlock, intertwined and needle-filled, and tell guests how he’d created whole worlds while playing around such roots on his family’s farm in Connecticut.

Our first summer, when we were building our house, we cooked outside over an open fire. That September, when we moved inside and I began preparing meals on a woodstove, I realized how much I liked handling wood, picking up a piece and thinking red oak as I stoked the fire, knowing that chunk of hardwood was going to burn slowly and maintain an even temperature in my oven. I liked the process of damping down the fire, finding that fine line between a clean blaze and a smoking stove.

As a child reader of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I had longed to go west in a covered wagon and be a pioneer. That was the play I had played, and now I was coming close to living it. Using an outhouse and making do without running water and electricity never felt like hardship. To me, hardship would have been living in the suburbs within commuting distance of some large East Coast city. That life, the dream of many in my generation, was one I wanted no part of. I knew this before I was thirteen. But what did I want? I’d loved growing up on the Lawrenceville School campus, so I thought I’d marry a schoolteacher like my father. But before I was out of high school I knew that life would be as deadening as that red brick house on the spacious lawn. I told myself I needed more room, though I didn’t exactly understand what I meant by that. But it had something to do with what my mother said after she had grown old: “You know, Laura, I never played by the rules.” So the kind of life Guy proposed was one I embraced without thought before I’d even tried it on, even if it meant living without running water, flush johns, or a telephone. Those things seemed unimportant compared with finding work that felt like play and freedom to live by my own rules. With Guy, I could light out for the territory.

“It’s good to take care of a piece of land for a while,” Guy often said. Each spring, when we unlatched the garden gate and plunged our sturdy garden forks into the soil, we greeted a new beginning. We had the knowledge gained from the season before inside us, and from the season before that. The same held for the work we did in our woods. We learned from our trees. The connection strengthened the more we spent time with them.

John Williams, our friend from the village, told us a story of a dairy farmer who, when asked why he was so successful, drawled, “Well, I guess I was always there.”

We couldn’t claim that. We weren’t always at Barra. But in a way we were. Deep down we never left our land.

When we first moved up we heard a lot of stories about ambitious back-to-the-landers who worked out systems for pumping water right into their kitchens, generating power, and otherwise trying to duplicate the conveniences they had left behind. Then we’d hear they had moved back to the city.

“How come?” we’d ask.

“The water system kept breaking down,” we’d be told.

Too many systems. Reliance on systems that kept needing repair. That was often what drove people off the land.

We had no “systems.” Guy knew that attempting to install plumbing or rig up some kind of solar power would cause him immense frustration.“ If it breaks down, and I can’t fix it, it makes me dependent on someone else to fix it.” It was important to Guy to have nothing at Barra he couldn’t fix. And Barra thrived because Guy had worked out a way of life that suited him. He had come to the end of the road in the “real” world. He had made the leap and found his own. But first, he had found me.

In our last months together Guy said, “Our life isn’t a model for anyone. People have been telling us for years we should write about it, but really, what we made work for us wouldn’t work for anyone else.” This was disappointing to Guy.

At the time I didn’t really agree with him. But I was too inside my own life to say that while no one would want to make a blueprint of our lives, what we had done—deliberately creating a life that means something—was important. That’s what visitors saw: that it was possible to follow the beat of that distant drummer of the heart. But that was only half the message. The other half was the practice of how we lived—lightly and sustainably. Neither of us saw, when we moved to the land in the early 1970s, that by the end of the century resource consumption would be an even more pressing issue, and even further from resolution. At Barra we were living at the far far end of the consumer curve. Visitors saw this, and they knew you didn’t have to homestead as stringently as we did to achieve it.

But still, we saw something, even if it was only how right the life was for each of us. In the spring, when we forked under the garden—a two-hundred-by-seventy-foot piece of ground—or in the fall, as we faced each other on either end of the crosscut saw, Guy would catch my eye with a grin and quote Kipling:

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing
tribal lays,
And—every—single—one—of—them—
is—right.

We struggled to find the balance between undertaking too much and allowing ourselves enough leisure time. By leisure time we meant giving ourselves time to enjoy our work at Barra in an unhurried manner, as well as time for writing, climbing, playing music, and being with friends.

We understood the importance of not overscheduling. Guy was in charge of drawing up the schedule, which he did on a three-week basis. He wrote it out on a three-by-five index card that I would find at my place at breakfast. I looked it over for spots that felt too crowded, and we talked about how to shift things around. Sometimes we settled for the jam-up if it was spring and the work was pressing. Or if we both longed, for instance, to fit in a particular climb with a friend. When we were satisfied with the shape of the next three weeks Guy posted the schedule on the bulletin board by the door.

On my own I would not have planned the way Guy did. But living an organized life, the habit of routine, agreed with me. I often found myself referring to the schedule so that I could look ahead. If I were down for laundry, say, I knew that my work would be over before midmorning and I’d have time to tinker with the short story I was working on or weed a patch of garden. Weeding for me was never “work.” Far from being onerous and dreaded, weeding produced in me, when I stood back and gazed upon the weed-free patch, a sense of satisfaction that is at the heart of all useful work, all work that has meaning.

It was Guy’s ability to plan that kept Barra running in a highly productive and efficient way.After the watershed year of Johnny’s death in 1981, it seemed that Guy needed the planning to help him keep control of his own life. This screw continued to tighten, but so gradually I wasn’t aware of it. Guy’s planning always made sense to me. It wasn’t until our last year that I began to see that he was driven by the three-by-five cards he carried in his shirt pocket.And had been for a long time.

Aside from the daily schedule,Guy kept a list of separate jobs he wanted to accomplish during the day. This, for him, was where the real difficulty lay. It became a problem for me because it was so difficult—impossible really—for him to resolve.

He needed to keep the pressure on. When he got it right, when he turned up the heat and kept the pot at a steady rolling boil, all went well. But if he adjusted the controls upward—that is, if he added more jobs to his list of afternoon jobs—the pot frothed over. Then he’d begin darting about from task to task, hovering only to pull out his three-by-five cards. I’d hope he was checking jobs off, but from the strained, squinty look he threw me I knew he was miserable, and it made me feel miserable as well. My saying “Go easy on yourself, Guy,” made no difference. I coped with his distress by continuing with my weeding. Being diligent about my own work was the only way I knew to help Guy or to help myself. But I often had a thought I couldn’t keep from crowding in—that next to the urgency of Guy’s work, my own work wasn’t important.All I could do was witness his desperation from someplace off on the sidelines and stick to my task. But the way he rushed around made me feel crowded out. I knew this made no sense. My work was often the same as Guy’s. I never mentioned these thoughts; in fact, I kept them so well submerged that I didn’t acknowledge them as thoughts at all.

Still, Guy continued to joke about “unspecified recreation”—his term for when one or the other of us wasn’t engaged in a specific job, like planting or canning or bread making or wood collecting, and we could do “whatever we wanted.” I picked what I liked doing anyway, often weeding my flower beds or the strawberries or the asparagus patch, while Guy headed off for the woods with ax and saw.

When our friends learned that we felt pressure too, they seemed surprised. Perhaps they wanted to see Barra as an idyll, a haven, a place exempt from life’s stresses and strains. And it was true that we’d stepped off the traditional treadmill.

The pressures at Barra were different, and I felt them in a different way from Guy. Because he was such a careful scheduler, I knew everything would get done—the garden would be planted, the wood collected—just as it always had. The pressure I felt came from the pressure Guy put on himself, which increased as his own storm clouds thickened.

Perhaps what people saw at Barra was a certain freedom.Admitting to feeling pressured or rushed or overwhelmed didn’t seem to go with freedom. The freedom was certainly real. We had chosen a way of life, and we were free to make our own structure within its bounds, boundaries set by the seasons.

In early spring the schedule looked like this:

We began in spring with digging under the cover crop of winter rye. Not all at once—the garden was too big for that. We worked on it about twenty minutes after lunch each day. That was the routine. It was Guy’s idea to break big tasks down into manageable segments. I always welcomed the “digging up,” as we called it. Forking in manure and winter rye and wood ash collected from winter fires as we prepared our soil for planting kept me in touch with how it looked. We picked out stones and set them aside for later use in building projects. We kept our eyes peeled for worms (good!). But if we spotted fat white grubs or orange wire worms or mean-faced cutworms, we put them in a jar. Guy called this the Better Barra Beetle Bottle and joked with visitors that the offending creature could gain freedom by producing two letters of recommendation. So far, he said, none had.

Other spring jobs included building the compost pile as well as mulching and manuring our rhubarb and asparagus beds, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries. We used a manual reel lawn mower to cut the grassy paths in our garden and around the flower beds. We trimmed the borders with hand clippers.

In May I began canning, starting with the rhubarb, which I turned into jam and several kinds of condiments; I also put up just plain rhubarb stewed with maple syrup, which we ate at breakfast during the winter. I made all our jams, jellies, and condiments with our maple syrup. The canning progressed through the peas, broccoli, beans, cauliflower, corn, cabbage, cucumbers, tomatoes, and pumpkins, ending in a grand finale in October with apples.

Work, yes, but when we ate raspberries in January that I’d put up in syrup the previous July, we could taste the sun in them. When I descended the ladder to our root cellar for ajar of beans for supper, my eyes ran over all the jars stored there, six deep on the shelves. There was ample food to last us for a year. I knew the personal history of every vegetable I had canned or layered in sand, like beets and carrots, or heaped in the slatted bins, like potatoes and onions.

We spent an average of twenty-three days a year collecting eight cords of firewood for the cabin and the sugar shed, using an ax, bowsaws, a crosscut saw, and our invaluable peavey, a logger’s tool that can lever, roll, and twitch trunks too heavy to lift. We began in May and ended just before Thanksgiving, collecting wood in multiples of four feet, carrying it to the house, sawing it into four-foot lengths, and stacking it in cord sections.

Nearly daily we worked up firewood. Guy split while I sawed, and this was a task we also worked on for twenty minutes or so each day. In the winter months, when we burned more wood and had more time to spend on it, we worked for longer. The more wood I sawed, the more I loved to saw wood. It produced the same soul-deep contentment that weeding did. If I didn’t saw for a few days, I missed it. “Perhaps I’m half-beaver,” I said to Guy. “My front teeth will grow long if I don’t keep gnawing down trees.”

White ash, I’d think, or rock maple, naming to myself each four-foot log I put on the sawhorse. When I told Guy I did this, he said he did the same. We also discovered that we counted saw strokes, something we’d each done for years without the other knowing. When I began writing short fiction I found that ideas came into my head when I was engaged in the meditative work of sawing wood or weeding.

Guy carried water to the house every morning—we consumed two to three gallons a day—and picked up the temperatures, which he read at three different locations: in the woods, at the garden, and at the house. I took care of the kerosene lamps, keeping them filled and cleaned.

I made the three-mile round trip out for the mail about three times a week, in the afternoon. The mail was our only means of communication with the outside world. It was the way we handled all our work with magazine and book editors; it was how we kept in touch with friends and family or made plans involving others. Once, when we walked into the post office with our friend Bonnie Christie and she saw the hunk of letters we pulled out of our box, she said, “Boy, you get a lot of mail!”

Our postmaster at the time leaned out of his window and said, “Yep, we’re a higher-class post office because of Guy and Laura.” He was joking, of course.

Then, on the day we were down to plant the corn, it might rain. That meant shifting the schedule to an indoor task like writing or baking bread or laundry or canning. The weather had a big say in everything we did. If the spring was dry, for instance, we watered the garden every evening, for forty-five minutes to an hour, hand-carrying the water from our stream in watering cans. I carried so much water, so many buckets of sap to the sugar house, and so much cow manure to the garden from where we had dumped it a quarter of a mile uphill, that by the mid-1980s I had tendinitis in both elbows and had to begin using a yoke. I was very fond of that yoke. Now I see it was a symbol too—of the work Barra exacted. It made no difference that Guy never developed any serious joint problems and never used the yoke; he too was yoked to Barra. We were a yoked team.

Ongoing tasks included maintenance to our buildings and upkeep on our paths and road. We also had seasonal jobs, like cleaning our chimney and stoves twice a year and taking down in spring and putting up in fall the big window in our outhouse. We cleaned out and often repainted the rain barrel behind our cabin. In winter we shoveled snow off our roofs.A big job was clipping back the undergrowth that threatened to turn our three-acre clearing into forest again. For many years we clipped back as well the young saplings around our sugar shed that had sprouted when we thinned the forest to give room to certain sugar maples. We wanted to move around our woods easily, especially when we were collecting sap, and so we began clipping out these saplings over an area of perhaps five or six acres. When we had a young family visiting once, we persuaded ourselves that they might find this work interesting. They stuck to it until all had dropped out but the father, who went on doggedly wielding the clippers, engaging us in conversation of such jetlike intensity that it was clear even to us, that while he could stick this out, such an effort was entirely too labor-intensive, and probably useless in the end.After a few more years we gave up on this Sisyphean project, rationalizing that by now, surely, the canopy had filled in enough to slow down the sapling growth.

Guy gave me a hammock as a birthday gift one year. It was a symbol, he said, with a knowing look. We hung it between two trees behind the house. We made a point of lying in it a few times, staring at the sky way up there through the leafy green. We strung up this hammock every spring and took it down in the fall. Eventually that was all we were doing with it, so we gave it away.

We spent our afternoons “working” too. We’d do lighter tasks like weeding or the mowing and clipping. Perhaps we’d turn the compost pile or work for a few hours on Twin Firs Camp. But when I stop to think about it, what else would we have done in the afternoons? Perhaps we would have taken more walks.

Would I have worked this hard if it hadn’t been for Guy? I was looking for meaningful work, and I had found it. Strong in me is the nature to strive, passed on by my Yankee forebears.Alive in me also is the outdated, outmoded belief in the perfectibility of character (mine) through hard work. With Guy, and through the work at Barra, this belief, like cream, rose to the top.

At the beginning the tone of the work—the way we carried it out—was lighthearted. It was play. Though the streak that lay in Guy to turn it grim was there, it rarely showed itself. When the balance was overturned and Guy’s need to keep control of his world intensified, the way in which he went about the work changed also. Guy’s moods affected me, though I tried to hide this from him and from myself. But the work—solid, tangible, with soul-satisfying results—sustained me. It was refuge. It confirmed our partnership.

We welcomed many visitors to Barra. In 1973 and 1974, we hosted 110 individual guests, many overnight, some for the day. Guy kept a list of course! Many were friends and relatives. Some were acquaintances, and others were friends of acquaintances. All came to see what this strange couple was doing out in this place they had to walk to. Most came to lend a hand. Winter saw the fewest visitors, but beginning in March with sugaring and continuing through to November, we often had people at Barra for more than half the days in each month.

We knew it wasn’t easy to get there. In the first place, they had to find us. Guy had made a map that we mailed to first-time visitors. The land was hilly, however, and the path forked several times, and though he often redrew our map in response to the suggestions of visitors who took the wrong fork, we never entirely solved the wrong-turn problem that sent newcomers wandering around the woods carrying their heavy backpacking gear.

Guests couldn’t pick up the phone and call to set a date or to change plans at the last minute. They had to make arrangements entirely by mail and well in advance. If something unavoidable came up, they couldn’t let us know. Nonetheless, there were very few instances of visitors just not showing up.

Sugaring was a wonderful time for visitors.The diverse tasks lent themselves to many hands: collecting sap, sawing wood and stoking the fires, adding sap to the evaporator, and drawing off the syrup. A very pleasant moment came in the late afternoon after the day’s sap had been collected and we were letting the fire die. I would boil up a pot of tea laced with new syrup, and as the shadows lengthened our conversation deepened, drawing us a little closer to the smoldering fire.

The rest of the year we shaped our work to the visitor. Some came to garden; others enjoyed the workout of hauling wood or the unaccustomed fun of using ax and saw. We were careful not to inflict on anyone the weeding or the mowing and clipping—the unskilled labor we did with the reel mower and hand clippers. Work on our guest cabin, Twin Firs Camp, lent itself to many hands using mallets and chisels.

Working with guests had the effect of making Guy and me work harder. The visitor always worked hard, and we didn’t want to let our end down. Many of our friends returned to Barra year after year. They came to feel, I believe, a sense of community with the land. They came to partake in the immediate meaning in working for one’s food and fuel.

Our friend Brad Snyder, who had introduced Guy to the Nearings’ book, took an interest in our project from its conception. It was great to have Brad around when we ran into snags. In fact, we saved for Brad our toughest problems, like conceptualizing the placement of the stringer and header logs for Twin Firs Camp. This was a complex problem because Guy and I had broken up the straight lines of this little building with a lot of angles so that we would be able to lift the logs ourselves.

We also saved for very close friends the job of moving the outhouse. We did this every four or five years and had a neat system of three adjacent holes, dug three to four feet deep. We had constructed the building so we could remove the plywood sides and lift off the roof, leaving the stud frame, which we moved on roller logs the few feet over to the next hole. We rotated the holes about every twelve years. By that time what had gone in had turned to a rich, dark soil that I could put on my flower beds.

Guests often brought food to Barra, packing in items they knew we didn’t grow, like grapefruit, oranges, and bananas; cheese, fresh milk, and eggs; green peppers and eggplant in the dead of winter; and often (very often!) ice cream. Guests quickly found out that Guy and I had a profound disagreement on one point: he liked vanilla, and I went for anything chocolate.

Our guests’ offerings of food, especially when they were packing in three or four grapefruit, a pineapple, several big round melons, even a coconut, were not to be taken (ahem) lightly. When we expressed appreciation and surprise at the sheer quantity they’d carried in, they often said, well, we didn’t want to tax your supplies.

I never understood why guests said this until the winter after Guy died. I was living in the village, and one day I walked up to Barra to help Lisa Troy, the winter caretaker, prune the fruit trees. Lisa was stirring squash soup on the cookstove as I arrived. I felt reluctant to eat Lisa’s soup, as well as her homemade bread. I’d brought some food myself and quickly laid it out on the table—feeling, I realized, much as our guests might have felt. It was an interesting reversal. What our guests had seen was the work we put into our garden and how dependent we were on it. They saw that what we couldn’t grow, like rice or peanut butter, had to be packed in. I was stunned by my lack of perception. I had been too caught up in living my life to be able to see around the edges.

Occasionally we were surprised by unexpected visitors. We were always working on some task, and I would watch Guy’s eyes get that squinty look that told me he found the interruption hard. It meant he’d have to carry those jobs he had wanted to finish that afternoon over to the next day. But he’d drop his work to say hello and take the guests up on the porch, then go in the house for glasses and fresh water and some of the crackers I made when I baked bread. Guy had told me years before how important it was to him to act the welcoming host. The guests often offered to lend a hand, saying they didn’t want to take us away from our work. Eventually the squinty look would ease as Guy became absorbed by the visit from these friends who had been kind enough to stop by and whom we had not seen in months.

A question we were often asked by first-time visitors as they looked around our cabin was, “You don’t have a radio? How do you get news?”

“Well,” Guy would answer with a mock-serious face, “we subscribe to two papers, Baseball Weekly and the New York Review of Books. If it’s something important, we’ll hear about it sooner or later.”

“People send us clippings in the mail of news they feel we’d like to know about,” I’d add in an effort to help out.

The visitor would smile politely, and the subject was usually dropped. Perhaps it seemed that a newscaster’s voice coming out of a little box didn’t fit with a life that encompassed hand tools, no motors, no evidence of a car. No electricity. Not even a hand pump in the kitchen. An outhouse. And there was that mile walk in. The Watermans lived closer to the pony express era than to e-mail, but why, the visitor might have thought, didn’t they subscribe to a daily paper?

I had always maintained a very loose connection with the news; I never read a paper on a daily basis, not while I was in school, not even when I lived in New York. But what about Guy? He had lived a life of intense political involvement when he worked in Washington. He often told me that he liked either to involve himself to the point of immersion or, if he got out, to do so completely, though perhaps these breaks were not as clean as he imagined. For instance, after he had left Washington, he attempted—and failed—to get into Connecticut politics when he began working in New York. But after he moved to Barra, no news reached us over the AP or any other wire.

Our first summer, 1973, Watergate was at its height. Nixon, a president Guy knew and had worked for, was going through the impeachment process, but Guy did no more than glance at the headlines in the newsstand in nearby Bradford. “They found another tape,” he’d say. But he never bought the paper.

As I’ve come to see, Barra was Guy’s creation. It was his last attempt to reinvent himself. He talked often about his Washington days, going over and over the what-ifs. He saw his time on Capitol Hill as the most exciting and intense period of his working life. But I came to see that it had contained disappointment, even heartache. Guy was plagued by the feeling that he could have done better, that he had let himself, and others, down. Bringing the news into Barra was, I believe, the last thing he wanted to do. Since I had never been much in touch with news, I never noticed, or even thought about, its absence.

Opera was much more important to me than news. When I was living in New York I had sat in the Family Circle at the Metropolitan every two weeks, on average, for six or seven years. I rarely missed the Saturday afternoon broadcasts. But now, between my absorption in climbing and our life of homesteading, opera had just dropped out. It belonged to another world, and I didn’t miss it.

It was Guy who had seen, on the very first day we walked onto our land, that the shape of the hills turned Barra into its own contained world. He dubbed the graceful white birch at the entrance to our clearing the Gabriel Birch, after the archangel who guarded the portals of Eden. For me, whenever I had been away and I walked back into Barra, it was as though I returned to a country where past memory is erased. Like Ulysses in the land of the Lotus Eaters. But the image that resonated deepest for me was Barra as Huck Finn’s raft. That raft is a happy place. On the raft Huck and Jim are at a safe distance from the perils of the world.

But occasionally Huck and Jim have to leave the raft. This got harder for Guy.“I’m fine at Barra,” he’d say,“though you have to put up with my bad moods. It’s dealing with the outside world that’s hard.”

As for me, beginning in the early 1980s, my trips away increased as old-age problems caught up with my parents.After my father had died and we had moved my mother to a retirement home closer to us, I continued to visit old friends in Lawrenceville and always stopped to see my friend Annie Barry, who lived in New York.

“It’s hard to leave Barra,” I’d say to Guy. But I had learned that once I was on my way, I had a good time. In fact, though I didn’t see it, and would never have admitted it, the break from Guy was good for me.

I made these trips in winter, the quiet season. The night before, Guy lashed my suitcase onto his packboard. My bus left White River Junction at 10:40 a.m. Guy figured we needed one hour to snowshoe out, scrape ice off the windshield, and stop by the post office, and another hour for the drive. Then he added an extra half-hour in case the car didn’t start or the driving was bad or anything else unforeseen came up. That would get me to the bus station early, but I much preferred waiting there to running into a delay that had me nervous about missing the bus.

This morning as we mushed down the path in the frosty light, I swung a look back at our cabin hunkered beneath the steep hillside, smoke curling out of the chimney. Then we entered the woods, and the clearing—our Barra world—disappeared.

At the bus station I bought my round-trip ticket. Guy, standing beside me at the counter, seemed pulled into himself. He was heading out the next day to the mountains on a solo trip, and I knew he was keyed up. But that didn’t explain why he seemed so down. He was just down. I picked up a schedule, and we checked the arrival time of my return. “Do you want to keep this?” I asked, even though I knew we had a bus schedule at home.

He started to tuck it into his shirt pocket along with his three-by-five cards, then put it back on the counter. “I won’t need it,” he said. The moment had come to say good-bye, although the bus wasn’t due to depart for another twenty-five minutes. Guy sat down in one of the plastic seats, and I sat next to him. He stared at his boots, which were making puddles on the floor. The corners of his mouth were drawn down, and his big hands clenched in his lap. His knuckles glared, enlarged and red, in the fluorescent lights of the bus station.

“You can leave if you want, Guy,” I said. I had placed one foot into this trip, and I knew it would be easier for me if he just headed back to Barra and finished up his packing for his trip.

“You’ll be all right?” he asked.

“Yep,” I gave him a silly, confident grin I knew was out of tune with his mood. Out of tune with my own.

We stood up, and I walked with him to the door of the terminal. The place reeked of exhaust. More people in heavy coats were coming in, and a line had formed at the ticket counter. We hugged each other hard.

I stood on the inside of the plate-glass door and watched him cross the snowy parking lot and get in the car. A puff of white came out of the tailpipe. He backed up, and as he pulled past me he raised a hand in farewell, but he didn’t grin. I stayed by the door until the white Subaru had disappeared.

I returned to my seat and pulled out my book. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good to think too much about how Guy was feeling. He would be there to meet the 8:10 p.m. bus a week from Sunday in a better mood than when he left. What could stop him would be an accident on the road or ordinary car trouble. We had a plan if he didn’t show up. I was to call our friends the Cornells. Way, way stuffed in the back of my mind was the thought that he might not come out of the mountains. But it was only when I knew he was low in his mind that my thoughts went in this direction. The faith that he would be there to meet my bus went along with trusting that he would never drink again. I was very good at trusting.

On the bus I pulled out the food I’d fixed the night before and looked around at the other passengers with their coffee in plastic cups and McDonald’s French fries. I crunched a rooty, earthy-smelling carrot. The light coming in the bus’s tinted window bleached it an unhealthy yellow.

In New York’s Port Authority bus terminal I purchased a ticket for my trip out to New Jersey. “How much?” I asked the face behind the window a second time, forcing myself to focus. I could feel the line behind me—people shifting their packages—impatient with this person from the country who was taking too long.

But first I was spending a few days with Annie Barry.As I walked down the sidewalk on my way to her apartment in the East Village I tried to stride along like everyone else. But I knew, from their quick sidewise glances, that I appeared to be an alien in my “big mudder” boots with a pack on my back.

I was very conscious of horns honking, cars squealing, buses farting, and people, people, people moving at high speed past me. The rap of their heels on the pavement exuded efficiency and purpose. My rubber-soled boots made a soft scuffing, hardly audible even to me.

Barra felt very far away. I ran my hand along the side of a building and examined the grit that covered my fingers. It was impossible to tell where the city grit began and the Barra dirt left off, but I began to feel better. There was the market on the corner with its appetizing display of fruits and vegetables. The bookstore I used to visit looked much the same! Suddenly, I was striding along, caught up in the thrum of the noise and hustle and smell of the city, even though I was sweating into my bulky country clothes.

At the end of the week, heading home, as soon as the bus crossed into Vermont I couldn’t concentrate on my book. I knew Guy would be there. That is, I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t. He always made a point of getting to the station early. I myself was ready, pack on, scarf on, hat on, suitcase in my mittened hand, perched on the edge of my seat.As the bus pulled in I caught sight of him standing solid outside—a man wearing a tam at a jaunty angle. I was the first to spring off the bus.

In the car I had him tell me everything that had happened at Barra first. We couldn’t stop talking, and when finally I snowshoed past the Gabriel Birch, Guy behind me with my suitcase strapped to his packboard, I had, once again, safely returned to Huck Finn’s raft. It was dark, but I knew that to my left lay the garden under the snow; straight ahead sat the cabin, secure on its slope, protected on the north by the steep hardwood hillside.