How to Cook a Moose (13 page)

For the first time, living in New England has acquainted me viscerally with the connection between the weather and time of year and the natural world and food chain. This land of farmers has distinct cycles of planting, growing, harvest. Then there's a kind of patient regrouping during the very long, very cold, very quiet winters, which provide a deep rest for people and land alike; a state of hibernating renewal during which wild animals scramble to stay alive. Thin coyotes and hungry blue jays forage for fallen apples in the orchards; squirrels take refuge in warm eaves and people live on the harvest's stored root vegetables, canned garden produce, and frozen packages of meat; farmers pick rocks out of their fields and spend hours by the fire poring over seed catalogues dreaming of their spring plantings. And hermit writers hunker down, burrow in, and work.

On the whole, it's true, what I tell people about loving the winters up here. Up here, when it snows, everyone goes out and shovels and plows and throws sand and salt, and then we all get on with our days. In New York, life generally ground to a halt after a snowstorm for one perfect day of quiet and dazzling white, sledding in parks and snowmen near front stoops, and then the gears reengaged, the soot and grime descended, and the sidewalks remained frozen, treacherous obstacle courses of dirty snow-ice heaps until it all melted, finally, overflowing the gutters. In New England, snow is dealt with efficiently, without drama, as just another part of life. City sidewalks are clear, for the most part, and whenever it's possible, snowbanks are shoveled out of the way of pedestrians and traffic.

In fact, winter is in many ways my favorite time to be in the White Mountains, in the farmhouse with Brendan and Dingo, the three of us all alone at the end of the dirt road. Winter in the countryside is flat-out beautiful, even the bleakest, coldest days; the snow is
white and clean, the air is crystalline and fresh. There is no better place or time to work productively, day after day, free of social obligations and distractions. Brendan and I sit writing at the kitchen table, looking out the window at the bare, white mountains, while Dingo guards the house on his window seat, ears tipped forward on full alert, eyes glued to what's going on out the window, which isn't much.

The outside world is muffled and still. Bare black branches drip in an icy rain or are covered in heavy snowfall. Fog hangs over the lake and shrouds the mountains. Snow lies in a thick blanket up to the first or second or third rung of the fences. The sky hangs low over the hemlocks on the ridge. But our daily walks are thrilling as we tromp through bracing, cold air on the frozen road. Often, the sun pierces the clouds and gilds the snow-furred hemlocks. The frozen lake creaks with otherworldly theremin-like moans and eerie shrieks. Sparkling snowflakes hang in the bright frigid air and fall in clumps from hemlock boughs. By the end, we're warm and sweaty, noses running, layers stripped off.

It's a very cozy season; since it's almost always dark, the distinction between day and night becomes a matter of perspective. One deep winter night, our whole household was up and awake at three in the morning. We humans woke up first. Brendan went downstairs. Optimistically, I tried to lull myself back to sleep just because it seemed like the thing to do, but then it dawned on me that it didn't matter if I got up now and then slept all morning. Suddenly hungry, I put on my bathrobe and went down to see what was happening. Brendan was sitting in the armchair by the fireplace, writing. He'd built a little fire, and the room was dark and warm. Dingo wasn't in bed anymore, either; he lay on his window seat. He looked at me, thoroughly befuddled: Why was it time to start his workday when it was still dark? Where was his breakfast?

I curled up at one end of the couch and started reading yet another engrossing Maine memoir. The room was aglow with firelight. Brendan
tapped away at his keyboard. The logs crackled. Dingo snorted gently to let us know he was still wondering where his breakfast was. Outside, it was pitch dark. Inside, we were three solitary wakeful beings marooned together in a pool of light and warmth in a vast, sleeping landscape.

I read the whole book in three hours, then, yawning, my eyes almost shut, I climbed the stairs, got back between the flannel sheets, pulled the down comforter over my head, and fell into a deep sleep. I awoke to soft, snowy, late-morning light coming in the dormer windows and the smell of coffee.

Although it's lovely and cozy, winter in New England is always full of unforeseen challenges. One early February day, the farmhouse furnace, which was about three decades old and had been limping along for the past five or more years on replacement belts and magic, was officially pronounced dead—or rather, it had cracked, and the carbon monoxide it was probably giving off would be dangerous, if the house had been better insulated, or insulated at all.

Meanwhile, our house in Portland was now home to four humans, two dogs, a cat, and an indeterminate number of squirrels. Over the winter, according to our upstairs tenants, the squirrel population had exploded and expanded. Before, according to them, they could hear the family of squirrels talking, fighting, having sex, giving birth, celebrating, and dying, leaving their excretions and carcasses within the walls of the house, and that was bad enough. But this winter, the squirrels seemed to have quadrupled in number and expanded from the walls into the ceiling. And now, they could also hear their vigorous chewing, of the house itself.

A dangerous, dead furnace and a rapacious infestation of squirrels—both problematic, potentially expensive, and time-consuming to deal with. Welcome to the northeast corner. A new furnace cost a small fortune. Exterminators charged as much as $75 per squirrel; who knew how many were up there? More were born every day, evidently.

When the guy from White Mountain Oil & Propane tested the carbon monoxide levels, by law he had to shut the furnace off, which left us completely without heat in the middle of February. There's a Jøtul woodstove in the middle downstairs room, but we were low on wood because we hadn't been here that fall to buy another cord; we only had a few sticks left. It was a warm 35 degrees, but the following week was going to bring another polar blast. We wouldn't be here, fortunately, so we could empty the pipes and shut off the water and skedaddle back to town, and our squirrel problem, but we were coming back to the farmhouse in mid-March, which would still be full-on winter. It was clearly time to replace the furnace.

Back in Portland, we debated what to do about those squirrels. I fantasized about camping out in a lawn chair with my .22 (I did not own a .22, but would have happily bought one for this purpose) and picking them off one by one as they came down the fire escape. I had no ethical problem with this, because I would then, equally hypothetically, dress, cook, and eat them. Friends who'd done so assured me they were delicious: squirrel potpie, braised squirrel stew, deep-fried squirrels with cream gravy—we could eat free-range, organic meat for weeks.

But, too bad, it was illegal to shoot a gun within city limits. And catch-and-release in the dead of winter is cruel; they would freeze and starve to death wherever we dropped them, far from their summer's worth of caches and stashes of food.

Ah, the joys of winter in the Far North! At least we had plenty of water and food. At least the farmhouse was nicely porous, so we didn't die from carbon monoxide poisoning while the old furnace was exhaling
its toxic last breaths. And at least those squirrels hadn't chewed through any electrical wiring and set our Portland house on fire. Yet.

For the rest of the winter, we watched fat squirrels sitting outside the kitchen window, staring in at us, looking as if they'd taste delicious in
écureuil au vin
. Finally, in the spring, our tenants caught them one by one in Havahart traps and released them in a graveyard in South Portland, where the family was reunited, or so I liked to think.

And the farmhouse got a brand-new furnace.

Spring came, finally, but our troubles weren't altogether over. This northeastern corner of the country is notable for dishing out the cruelest April I've ever known, breeding icicles out of the dead land, mixing ennui and irritation, stunting dull roots with unseasonable snow. Cabin Fever Month finally goes out with a soft exhalation of sunny updrafts that shake the new buds and cause the crocuses to bob like the heads of dashboard hula girls, and all is forgiven, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten any of its earlier depredations.

How many marriages up here have ended in divorce as a result of all the winter's many seasons and their ensuing challenges? There aren't just four seasons here, there are about ten: early winter, bleak midwinter, January false spring, deep winter, late winter, March false spring, and finally mud season. After that comes blackfly season, and then it's summer for a minute, and then it's fall again, tipping over into those seven or eight months of winter. It whirls around so fast.

Mud season might be the toughest of all to take. It's a cruel joke: Where is spring? The winter is over. Why isn't it warm and green yet? In April, everyone seems to go a little mad, but not in any romantic or transcendent way. Up here, the phrase “mixing memory and desire” from Eliot's “The Waste Land” might be more aptly phrased as
“muddling nostalgia and craving.” Memory and desire are more literary and refined, the sort of emotions a well-bred lady might swoon with, requiring smelling salts, a lavender hankie, or, at the very least, a thimbleful of sherry, a turn about the topiary garden. Nostalgia and craving are blunter, more animal and immediate, and therefore closer to my own experience, living here. They're also basically the same thing, except one is hunger for the past and the other is hunger for the future.

One mud-season morning in Portland, we awoke to yet another cold, rainy, gray day. We were all craving sun and spring. As I put my coat on yet again to take Dingo out, I thought, what season is this? Outside, I adjusted my expectations, put on my hood, tried to convince myself that spring would be here any day. I let Dingo trundle me around our block, jerking my arm as he suddenly stopped to pee, making me wait while he sniffed with full concentration. I scooped up his neat turds with a long-practiced swipe of the bag and carried it in the hand that didn't have the leash. Never do I feel more clear about the power dynamic of our relationship than on the morning walk.

The chilly air forced me to stay retracted into myself, like a prolonged inhalation, when I was jonesing to expand and turn outward and get the stale air out of my lungs. The trees and bushes in this town were just starting to bud, but barely, cautiously; I was sure they all felt the same way I did, as well as the bulb flowers, which were getting a late start in recently thawed dirt.

The enormous old ash tree in back of our house, which puts out leaves much later than the trees around it, was showing no sign of renewed life yet. Everyone was walking around hunched into warm clothes, looking askance at the sky, griping to anyone who would listen, marveling at how disappointed we all felt after such a brutal winter to be denied a warm, sunny spring. It felt unnatural and cruel. Our bones were cold and our timbers were shivering.

Later, Brendan and Dingo and I took our usual mid-morning walk on the Eastern Prom as the foghorn lowed, the high tide slapped and sucked against the stone seawall, the pavement and gravel and grass all sopping wet. It was too foggy to see the bay or islands. The rain slid down, greasy and cold, not a spring rain but a chilly one, with malicious intent. Up on the cliffs, the still-bare branches dripped. The only people out besides us were two groups of men, none of them up to any good: a couple of wild-eyed hobos drinking hooch and puffing cheap cigars on the stone steps up to the trail (“Happy spring! Beautiful spring day!” they trumpeted at us as we climbed up past them, cackling as if this were the best joke ever made), and then a group of three preppy, athletic-looking teenage boys in blazers and khakis. They ambled by us on the mucky path, not making eye contact, trailing the smell of skunky ganja. They looked like sweet-natured, well-bred high-school seniors cutting school.