Out of the Woods (19 page)

I had to admit that made sense. Marty's words called to mind a line from a documentary I'd seen. Two Alabama hunters are asked how they find their way in the trackless swamps in which they roam. We don't need to know north or south, says one of them. We got the trees named.

And that is the crux of the matter. So much of direction, of having a sense of direction, is bound up in a sense of place, of knowing where home lies even when you don't know exactly where you are. If you have walked a wood for so many years that the trees have names and characters, are by way of being old friends, then the route you take is a kind of songline, a path of memory, mood, desire, regret, of passing moments and striking images that create maps more durable than anything on paper or beeping bits of metal and plastic.

In my neighborhood, it is much the same. When I first arrived in South Woodstock, I was asking directions constantly, and just as constantly coming away confounded. How do I get to the store? I would ask the two guys mudbugging on a dirt road whose name I didn't know. Easy, they would say. Just walk three hundred yards and hang a left at Connor's pond. Head down toward the Fullerton cemetery, but if you hit the Giddyup Road, you've gone too far east.

The Giddyup Road?

Yeah, the bumpy one where those boys crashed their rig that summer. We call it the Giddyup Road.

Ah, yes. Thanks.

But I wasn't from South Woodstock and I would never share that sense of familiarity and long association. The thing I wanted—the ineffable ability to read the landscape, to find clues in the lay of the land, whether you knew the place or not—apparently didn't exist. I felt a little disappointed. Maybe like the ancients, I needed direction to retain a little magic.

 

T
he rain finally stopped and Marty and I went back out to wilderness headquarters to practice using the compass in the real world.

I learned how to shoot a bearing, so that I could set a course toward an object that couldn't be seen in the distance. “Pretend your Jeep is a mountain,” Marty said, “and tell me what direction you would have to walk to get to it.” I stood out in the field, holding the compass level, with its sight line aimed at Mount Jeep. Then I slowly rotated the bezel surrounding its face until the north sign was directly over the north needle, what Marty calls “putting the red in the shed.” That done, the small notch in the front of the compass now told me that the Jeep was 260 degrees northwest of where I stood. Eureka! For an instant, the connection between a planet wobbling its way around the sun, a distant star, a thin red needle, and a muddy set of wheels made sense, and I marveled at the elegance of it all. Maybe I could do this.

I spent much of the next day marching up and down a dirt road. Marty was adamant that pacing was instrumental to finding your way: it all started, he said, with the ancient Romans, who devised the first unit of long-distance calculation, the
mille passuum,
or “one thousand paces,” each pace consisting of two steps: a thousand Roman paces worked out roughly to five thousand feet, and eventually the Roman
mille passuum
evolved into the English mile.

Pacing, Marty said, was a way of measuring distance in the field: if I knew how long it normally took me to cover a known distance, I could predict how far (or far afield) I had traveled in the woods. I would know, for instance, that if I had traveled for two hours in the direction of a lake and that in that time I normally covered about two miles over rough terrain, then I would know whether or not to be worried if the lake was nowhere in sight.

Marty was right, that was pretty cool, but practicing pacing was boring when it wasn't frustrating. Because everyone's individual pace is different—depending on the length of their legs and their style of walking, two people both six feet tall can have strides that vary in length significantly—it was important to learn your own. You did this by practicing, on different kinds of terrain, and under different conditions—uphill in high grass, downhill on gravel, in the rain and in the heat—learning how your own body reacted and adjusted to changing circumstances, so that eventually you would have a rough idea of your own individual average rate of speed. That Greek guy Socrates knew what he was talking about, Marty said. You're gonna have to learn you.

Marty had laid out a course on the long flat dirt road leading to his camp marked off in hundred-feet increments. With paper and pencil in hand I walked to the first marker, counting my paces in military fashion, leading with my right foot, and counting two steps as one pace. I wrote down the number of paces and then, starting once again at zero, counted off the paces to the next marker and then again to the third. On the return, I counted the paces straight back from the three-hundred-foot marker to the beginning. Then we compared the individual segments with one another, looking to see how consistent the number was.

Eventually, Marty said, we would arrive at the length of my average pace—a number, I gathered from the tone in which Marty explained this, that would rival the square root of
pi
in significance.

And so I paced. First up the road, then down the road. I tried to walk the way I usually walk, and to count—and one, and two, and—without letting my mind wander, but my numbers were wildly inconsistent. It was as if I had minced along in a kimono for one segment and galloped through a strenuous polka the next.

For a while Marty was undaunted, but at last even he gave up. I'm only teaching you the tools, he said. Then you're going to have to practice. He suggested I make myself a set of pacing beads, so that I could tick off one bead for every ten paces I walked, which would give me a rough idea of the distance I'd traveled and, assuming I regularly checked my watch, the length of time it had taken me to get that far. It sounded like a lot of work. Did Aggie have pacing beads? Aggie doesn't need pacing beads, Marty said. She has me.

Finally I was ready for a field exercise in which I would put together what I had learned so far. Marty had a course laid out, consisting of four posts positioned in a rough quadrangle over a large field normally used, he said, for tomahawk throwing competitions. I was to site my compass on each post successively, writing down the compass reading and following it until I could see the next post, while also measuring my paces. Done correctly, the bearings would bring me full circle back to my starting point and would correspond to the ones Marty had measured with a surveyor's instrument. My paces would tell me how long each side of the quadrangle was.

It took me about an hour. I walked with a Zen-like consciousness of every detail of that patch of ground, from the density of the brush, to the quality of the light and the strength of the breeze, as I tried to get the most accurate reading possible on the compass. The hyperattention made the terrain exotic, as if I were walking through heavy jungle or frozen tundra. I felt oddly confident—despite my shaky hold on what I was doing, there was something aside from myself to trust, a set of skills that, if relied upon correctly, would carry me through. In an odd way, it wasn't up to me.

At the end, I compared my compass readings with the accurate ones, and my paces with the actual length of the course. The results were a decidedly mixed bag: my compass readings were pretty good, while my paces, not surprisingly, were spectacularly off. I was excited about the compass, which was beginning to make sense, and while I knew I would never become deeply acquainted with a set of pacing beads, I saw why Marty was so set on my understanding the underlying concept. It was another way of keeping oneself in the present, of staying attuned to what you were doing and how you were doing it in an environment as changeable and unpredictable as the natural world.

We crammed in a lot over my two days at the Wilderness Survival Center and still just broke the surface of the intricacies of land navigation. Working with the map and the compass together, I learned the rudiments of determining my location by aligning the three-dimensional world around me to the two-dimensional one on paper, and how to work the same idea in reverse, using distinctive features and compass readings on the map to indicate which mountain or lake I might happen to be facing.

None of it would be of much help for the kind of navigation I had in mind, Marty said, the wandering about in the woods where there was little in the way of landmarks to act as guides and waypoints. That would only come in time and with a lot of practice, if it came at all. At the end he demonstrated some of the more homespun methods of finding your way—how to assess direction from the angle of the sun on an analog watch; how to determine north and south by the way a shadow falls from a stick planted in the ground; how to locate the North Star and calculate declension from the night sky. But Marty disdained the wilderness types who claimed that such skills were all you need, who believed that if you listened hard enough, you could hear the trees talking. Don't try to be friends with nature, he said. Nature will kill you. I tell people on my Web site, if you're looking for God or a spiritual experience, you're in the wrong place.

I left the Wilderness Survival Center bemused. Direction was not as difficult as I imagined, nor as fundamental as I hoped. Wayfinding was an art both simple and complicated: simple in its individual components, complex in the harmonies that map and compass, time and terrain, broad estimates and detailed calibrations must achieve. Direction was not beholden to grace or instinct; it was a puzzle that yielded to preparation, precision, and patience, to self-knowledge and a large dose of humility in the face of the unknown. None of which I possessed in any measurable quantity, but then, I had time. Sometimes, when you are lost, in life, as in the woods, the best thing you can do is stay put.

Finding my way, Marty had said, came down to practice, not merely because practice would make the now exotic techniques of wayfinding more familiar, but because practice led to experience—not only of map and compass but of the person using them. Learning how not to get lost was about knowing your own limitations, about what you couldn't do and didn't know, as much as it was about the reverse.

I thought about that on the drive home. About the need to factor in one's own limitations when charting any kind of course. The trick was weeding out the insubstantial stuff of fear from the basic elements of who you were, the nature of your own nature, the quirks and distortions in the fabric of your character that made you who you were.

I got lost for many reasons. For one, I had been too lazy to learn the basics of navigation, a neglect I was now doing something about. That should help with the fear. But I also got lost because I daydreamed, and daydreaming was one of the best parts of walking for me. I would have to figure out a way to account for that predilection, to figure out a way to fit my spacey ways into a plan that would also get me home. That's what Marty meant when he said, You have to learn you. Not just your strengths but also your limitations. I was glad he included the latter. It gave me a great deal more to work with.

 

H
eading up the road to Castle Dismal, I also thought about something else Marty had said: to know where you are going, you need to know where you have been. Looking back, fixing in your mind the path behind you, was as important as going forward.

9

The Wolf Tree

And the seventh sorrow

Is the slow goodbye.

—TED HUGHES,
“Winter in the Village”

T
hat fall I made frequent trips to my mother's house. For years, longer than any of her three children were willing to admit, she had been losing ground, following the usual progression of dementia, from the increasing number of misplaced objects to the day she couldn't find her way home to the neighborhood in which she had lived for nearly fifty years. She had taken a taxi to the airport to visit my brother and his wife in Florida. But the crowds at the airport confused her, and she turned on her heel and went back home. Or tried—she couldn't remember how to get there, and the cabdriver spent hours driving her around the neighborhood before she finally spotted a familiar street.

That's when my brothers and I began to talk to her about making some changes. At first we thought that perhaps she was simply too isolated, that she was becoming depressed—she had stopped going to church or participating in the choir or attending the Polish culture classes into which she had thrown herself with such gusto in the years following my father's death; maybe if she spent more time out of the house, she would feel better. Holly, my sister-in-law, took her to visit a community center that provided day care for the elderly. It seemed a pleasant little place, offering activities for every degree of lucidity, and we thought my mother, an intensely social being, would enjoy the respite from her isolation. Mom didn't say much during the visit, apparently, but afterward, in the supermarket, she gave Holly the slip in the meat section. Holly found her three aisles over, in canned goods, talking to a startled young woman with a small child in tow. Help, she was saying. Help! My children are trying to put me in a lunatic asylum!

Holly and my younger brother Chris lived about forty minutes away from my mother, and to them had fallen a disproportionate share of the task of maintaining the illusion that my mother could take care of herself. It was getting to be too much; I came down that fall to provide some backup. I had the time—the treatment was over, and Zoë was spending a semester abroad in Africa.

Together we tried to suggest to her that perhaps she could use a little part-time help, someone to do the things that increasingly were left undone. Like what, she demanded, and in truth, the items on the list, taken individually, sounded rather trivial at first. But over time they had begun to mount up. We mentioned the bathroom toilet that never got fixed, the bills that occasionally weren't paid, the dishes that went back into the cupboard unwashed. We mentioned how angry she became when we tried to do them for her. Leave that alone! she would shout. Get out of my house! We talked about the minor traffic accidents, the possibility that she should no longer be driving.

Anyone who has been through the experience knows the black humor, the surreality, and the guilty, pointless anger of these conversations. We were using logic in a land where logic had fled, we were holding on tightly, unconsciously to the parent who had for better or worse been the towering author of our lives. It seemed desperately important to get our mother to recognize what was happening to her, because if she could still do that, then the relationship was still intact. But, of course, for her, it was an admission she could not make without the very ground beneath her feet dissolving.

By November, it was clear that something had to be done. We tried a part-time solution, in the form of a gentle young Ugandan woman, a recent émigré. But Cecilia's endless patience and limitless Christian forgiveness were no match for the torrent of abuse and epithets, and finally physical attacks, my mother hurled at her, nor for my mother's tearful pleas for forgiveness when she was told what she had done. My brother and I began to visit places where she could live full-time.

I came back from one of these trips to find her sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the living room, staring out the window at the silent cul-de-sac. She had lived in the house, a traditional suburban Colonial, for over thirty years, since my father had retired from the military and I had gone to college. She spent most of her time there now in the living room, surrounded by the treasures she had fought so hard to acquire as a young army wife, the painted screens and hand-carved teak furniture, the porcelain vases and ivory statuettes that were the usual booty of such postwar tours of duty in Asia. The meat might be rotting in the refrigerator, and outside, amid the dead leaves on the unswept patio, a line of scorched pots and pans now bore witness to the loss of her cooking skills. But the brief and sudden sunsets of late fall always fell in this room on a scene of spotless perfection.

She smiled when I walked in—a rare occurrence in those days. We couldn't make her understand that we wanted to help her, and she eyed us, fearfully, angrily, as the enemies who would take her away. She was trying so hard to pretend that nothing was wrong. Her paranoia and distrust were part of the disease. They were also well founded, of course: we were trying to take her away from the place she said she would only leave feetfirst.

Don't try to reason with her, said the elder-care experts we consulted. But selfishly, I wanted my mother back, the embattled, abrasive, intrusive mother I knew, not the frightened, failing woman she had become, and so I tried again to tell her about the places we wanted to show her, about how worried we were.

We fell off the usual cliff, of course. Before long she had grabbed a section of the
Washington Post
and a pen. Tell me, she said. Tell me everything I'm doing wrong, so I can fix it. By then I was sick of all that couldn't be said or, once said, was immediately forgotten, so I tried again. Okay. You don't change the lightbulbs! I began, as if it were a felony offense, and as the words left my mouth I began to wonder who in fact the crazy one was.

She looked bewildered. Really? Okay. She wrote in the margins, next to a movie review, I don't change lightbulbs.

Chris took you to the doctor, I said, seeking firmer ground. You have vascular dementia. Your memory is being destroyed. You ask the same questions over and over again, you can't remember what you did an hour ago.

I still have the yellowed newsprint on which she took her notes of that conversation. She wrote in the wavering but still graceful longhand she learned from the nuns at the Polish Catholic grammar school in Pittsburgh. The words, clutching at a present that had already escaped her, crawled along the headlines for a recent photography exhibit on the front page and curled like smoke over the golden anniversaries announced on the back of the paper.

1. Memory Depose Defective.

2. I ask same question over

3. Never.

4. MRI. Long term memory destroyed

5. Cannot drive because broken.

What else? She yelled in the hoarse, strained voice that was all that was left to her. What else. I found myself idly wishing that I could go to Zoë in Africa, to sit her down and read a storybook to her then and there, the one that was her favorite.
Once there was a little bunny, who wanted to run away. If you run away, said his mother, I will run after you, for you are my little bunny.
The memory of those long-ago evenings calmed me, reminded me that I was both mother and daughter, just as the woman in front of me was both mother and child, one who also needed reassurance, as she drifted further and further away to a place I couldn't go.

What else? yelled my mother. What else?

I wanted to pull her frail body close and stroke her balding head and ask for her forgiveness, but there had been none of that in her family, as she put it, and so there had been none of that in ours. Never mind, I said, never mind, let's just watch a movie. I bought ice cream.

So we sat and watched something old and black-and-white and my mother dozed. Finally it was late and I woke her to make sure she went upstairs to bed. By then I had turned off the TV and we were sitting in semidarkness. She noticed I was holding her hand, and she tugged it free the way you do from any kind of trap. You know, she said as she set herself to the task of forcing her arthritic knees up the stairs. Someone should really change those lightbulbs.

 

E
ventually we found a place for my mother. It was a two-story house set on a quiet street in Alexandria, where a maximum of eight people lived out their days provided for by some of the kindest women I have ever met and presided over by an indefatigable former gerontological social worker, Pearlbea LaBier, a thirty-five-year veteran in the field who had come highly recommended by several elder-care specialists. We knew from our own visits that the house was clean and smelled of good home cooking and the residents looked well cared for. There were weekly music sessions and crafts and a shady front porch with white rocking chairs at the ready and the last of the summer roses flowering in the garden. We told ourselves she would be happy there.

We were lying: my mother had never been happy for more than twenty minutes at a time. She ran on fury and worry and the neediness that children who have never been properly loved carry with them for the rest of their days.

She would have been happier if we had taken her into our homes. That needs to be said, because that is the source of the guilt, of course. But none of us could take care of her without that care consuming the rest of our lives. And because we couldn't give her the one future she wanted, I think she was right: she would have been more content if she had been left to her misery in her own home, surrounded by her own things, until she finally fell down the stairs or developed an infection that went untended. But such a course was never an option: instead she would live a longer life in a place she didn't want to be, and that was the best we could do by way of kindness.

I went back to Vermont. I would return to help with the move, just before Thanksgiving, and to prepare the house to be rented; the money would help to pay for her care.

I had time on my hands when I got back to Castle Dismal. The knowledge that the next time I went back to my mother's house would be the last time short-circuited my resolve to get back to work in the intervening days. Instead I waited. I wasn't sure what I was waiting for, though sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, when the wind was shaking the trees, as if time itself had become tangled in the branches, and energy drifted out the door, I thought I was waiting for the phone to ring. It was the time of day my mother used to call. It had reached the point where she would call a dozen times or more, one call right after another, because she forgot each call as soon as it was made.

Those weren't the calls I was waiting for. I was waiting for her the way she was, when the thread of patience snapped ten minutes after I picked up the phone and the conversation snagged on old rusty pins hidden deep in the fabric of our long, long struggle. When I would end the call speechless with exasperation at how little she understood me, or she would hang up furious that I had failed to understand that all she meant by her criticism was concern, that I never listened to her. But I had listened too well, until finally, when it came time to take the full measure of my shortcomings, there was no longer a difference between her voice and my own.

The fall colors had been muted that year. The leaves had turned to brown without much ceremony and a hard rain had brought most of them down early, exposing the beauty of the bare black branches and the fact that the apple tree needed pruning. It was an old tree, which produced fruit every other year, good tart red apples, until this season, when the few that appeared were sickly looking, wizened, and small.

At least the apple tree was still standing. I had lost one tree the winter I was sick, in the aftermath of a terrific ice storm. It stood to the right of the house, on the edge of the septic field, an old, bent, broken, gnarled, hollowed grotesquerie of a tree that nonetheless always sprouted a few green shoots in the spring at the top of the blasted escarpment that had been its crown.

The fallen tree was a wolf tree—an old wide-crowned tree with a scarred and gnarled trunk and bent and broken branches twisted into fantastic shapes by decades of fierce storms and lightning strikes. Wolf trees begin benignly, sometimes as sole survivors in a cleared meadow, left behind by a farmer to provide shade and shelter for his animals after the other trees are reduced to stumps. Their solitude protects them for a long while, their size and the width of their leafy crowns, their enormous root systems, stealing sunshine and nutrients from would-be competitors.

No one really knows where the term
wolf tree
comes from, though there are many theories. All I knew was that it suited the grotesque beauty of the tree that stood near my house, and I loved it. I owed it a debt of gratitude as well—when I was new to the woods, it had been the one object I could recognize, the one that told me I was close to home. For me it still stood, much the way the World Trade Center still stood when I searched the southern skyline from the windows of my old apartment in New York. Some landmarks embed themselves in the cartography of the soul of a city, a village, a people. They live as long as memory lives.

I asked a young arborist to come to the aid of my ailing apple tree. Jon Hartland was a diminutive man, with craggy features and a beard that made him look like an elfin Abe Lincoln. He took a look at the apple tree. It needed pruning and nutrients, not to mention better drainage, all of which sounded expensive, and I wasn't feeling too sanguine about its chances.

But the tree was something of an excuse. I was more interested in what Hartland saw when he looked at the trees that surrounded the house and composed the woods in which I walked, what history surrounded me.

Mine was a small patch of northern hardwood, he said, a mixture for the most part of white and yellow birch, sugar maples, and American beech. The forest was young, a mere sixty or sixty-five years old. One hundred years ago, the hills in which my house was tucked were probably home to small sheep farms; when the wool industry failed, the occupants might have turned to dairy farming, or small crops, but gradually the land had been abandoned, and the places where the sheep had grazed were taken over first by goldenrod and asters, which killed the grass, then by brambles and the first wave of pioneer trees, poplars and birches, fast-growing, short-lived trees that gave way to the hardier, slower-growing maples and oaks.