Out of the Woods (21 page)

10

The Harriet Line

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

—HERMAN MELVILLE,
Moby-Dick

S
ometimes, you get lucky. A key falls into your lap, opening a door you didn't know was there.

The DeLorme Map Store's three-story revolving globe can be seen from Interstate 295 day or night, a nearly irresistible landmark to anyone traveling near the exit for Yarmouth, Maine, and a strangely reassuring presence to the congenitally lost—no matter where you are, somewhere on that expansive presence is home. A
Guinness Book of World Records
holder, the globe has a circumference of 129 feet, a surface area of 5,313 square feet, measures over 40 feet across, and weighs over two and a half tons.

Inside a glass atrium at the front of the store, the globe is girdled by three balconies at various levels, and so dominates the place that all the stuff for sale—state atlases, gazetteers, street maps of cities around the world, interactive mapping software, compasses, pencils, stuffed toys—seems almost an afterthought.

I had driven by the store frequently on my trips with Zoë, but I had never taken the time to go in. On the day I dropped her off for the fall term of her senior year, however, I realized that the opportunities to do so were drawing to a close.

Besides, I had a purpose of sorts. I needed, or thought I needed, the latest in topo map software, hoping to get more up-to-date information about my bit of woodland than my old paper copy had to offer. I had stared at its runic mysteries for hours before I understood how out-of-date it was: there were houses now and trails that hadn't existed when the map was drawn. I had learned a lot about direction since I first consulted that now creased and battered bit of paper, but apparently I still clung to the notion of a map's divine infallibility. Maps never lie, my friend Duncan, a brilliant sailor and outdoorsman, always thundered when his wife, Megan, or I would make some stupid navigational mistake. But they did get old.

I explained what I wanted to the pleasant-looking woman behind the counter. Got a compass? she asked. Yes, but not with me, I said. Know how to use it? Sort of, I said.

She walked out from behind the counter and pulled one of the store's simplest and least expensive compasses off the shelf and wrested it from its plastic nest. Okay, she said, handing it to me. Shoot me a bearing to that sign in the parking lot. I did so, more or less correctly, by my lights, in that I was only 180 degrees off, having aligned the magnetic needle with south instead of north.

Now show me what direction a bearing of 225 degrees is. That one I got right—it was southwest, and I beamed when she awarded me a nod of satisfaction. Apparently DeLorme was very picky as to whom it would sell its products. So about that software, I said. Maybe you could just point me in the right direction?

Judy Gilbert, for that was her name according to the laminated tag on her shirt, gestured vaguely at a couple of rows of shelves containing handsomely packaged boxes. “But that's not what you need,” she said. “What you need is practice.”

Gilbert was a registered Maine wilderness guide and had been an outdoor enthusiast all her life; she still retained the ruddy enthusiasm of a woman who would put on her hiking boots and head up a mountain at a moment's notice. She took seriously the responsibility of saving neophytes like me from their own ignorance.

I tried to explain the problem: how I lived surrounded by thickly wooded hills, how I had this dream of wandering through them at will, how every time I tried I ended up lost and confused, unable to understand what the compass was trying to tell me. I know, I should stick to the trails, I concluded, expecting a dry concurrence.

Not necessarily, she said. And then Judy Gilbert changed everything.

It was a simple thing, really. Start small, Judy said, as small as you need to feel safe. Mark out a space for yourself with clear landmarks, so that no matter how far you wander you will run into one of them eventually. The landmarks you choose are panic azimuths, or safety bearings, the idea being that if you walk in a straight line in any direction, you will get to one of them.

Then, she said, within the boundaries you have set for yourself, figure out a place you want to get to and, using your compass, determine what direction you need to travel to get there. Follow the route you have chosen until it does or does not get you where you want to go. Do it again and again, gradually enlarging the area, but always staying within a set of known boundaries, one in each direction, that act as a sort of safety net for your mistakes.

Gilbert then sold me the expensive software I wanted, which, thanks to her, I would never open.

 

I
started small, really small. The boundaries I set were ones even I couldn't ignore: the walls of the first floor of Castle Dismal. I stood at the windows, leveled my compass, and took rough bearings for the four cardinal directions. Then I began to draw a map of the room on the unruled side of a piece of eight-by-ten-inch printing paper.

The northern wall contained three windows that looked down upon the steep hill and the little creek below; I drew the bare winter branches, including the white birch that saved me during chemo, and the twisty parabolas of the creek and the top of the hill barely visible in the distance. The eastern windows, the ones that spilled the morning light onto the sofa where I worked, faced a hummocky clearing under which the septic tank was buried, a pillowy meadow of snow in winter, a wilderness of weeds and goldenrod in summer. I drew the window, framing in a red fox who used to pause there sometimes near sunset. Next to it I drew the eighteenth-century pinewood spindle that hung on the wall, its wooden bobbins bound by fraying yarns of grays and white and browns.

The front door, which in true Vermont fashion was never used, faced south. I drew the doorframe and the view it looked out on: the small yard, the fragile apple tree and tattered lilacs, a thin line approximating my road, the treacherous thread of dirt and rock, of mud and ice and car-swallowing ditches that wound down to Noah Wood Road and connected Castle Dismal to the outside world. On the blind side, the windowless wall facing west, I drew the fireplace and the woodstove that stood inside of it, and the ever-hungry, half-empty woodpile to the right. There it was, the place I had lived in for over three years.

When I was done I held the map the way you always hold a map, with north at the top, and looked out the window from the vantage point of the sofa. The sheet of paper nearly shrieked in my hand. Then, like a clumsy toddler, I turned the crude little drawing around until the birch tree I'd penciled in was aligned with the real one outside the glass. And suddenly, finally, I got it. By way of discovery it wasn't much, it wasn't Newton under the apple tree, or Archimedes in his bath, it was just a middle-aged woman standing in her living room, turning around a white rectangle and understanding that the world did not revolve around her. But it changed everything.

A map demands you do one of two things. Either you ignore it and the world it represents in favor of the picture you have in your head, or you learn to put yourself aside, and fit the image to what is actually in front of you. And if you are paying attention to the difference in scale between the world outside your window and the one you have just drawn, you might even smile just a bit at the dust mote that has settled on the paper, because it marks the relative size of the space in the cosmos you actually occupy.

Great doors turn on small hinges. I fiddled with a few rough doodles until a clump of cartoon trees faced the forest they attempted to represent, and found my place on the map.

Then I stood in the center of the room, near the staircase that divided the space in two, trying to imagine the newel post of the banister as the foothills of a forbidding mountain range that cleaved an unknown and undiscovered country, forcing me to rely on map and compass to get to the other side. Keeping in mind that I would have to make a set of ninety-degree U-turns to get around the staircase in order to stay on the same bearing, I headed for what lay beyond.

My bearing took me straight to the mantelpiece, just as my map reckoned it would, and there were the three ceramic candlesticks, a delicate blue scrolling hand painted on a bone white background, that my oldest friend had given me nearly fifteen years before, and I thought of our buoyant bumpy friendship. Next to them stood a blue pumpkin-shaped enameled box I'd taken from my mother's house when we dismantled her life, and next to it the photograph of my mother that had become such a touchstone, and this time I saw in its hesitant, fearful smile traces of my daughter, and of me. Another calculation took me by the same process to a framed map hanging on the wall, of the small town in New Hampshire where my father grew up, and I ran my finger along the outline of the lake where we once stayed for two shining weeks and the small cemetery where his father and brothers lay, all veterans of one war or another. A few degrees north took me to the ugly green La-Z-Boy recliner, and I thought about those first few days in the new and empty home and the way my footsteps echoed.

I had the hang of it now, but I didn't stop. I explored the room as if I had never seen it before, as if it had taken years to get there (which, in a way, it had), by camel, riverboat, and brigantine (which it most definitely did not). I was in an old world made suddenly new, mapping a small room holding a long life, the dusty bric-a-brac transformed into waypoints, crossroads, and signposts, pointing a way forward, revealing the way back. That is what direction is, after all, a way of seeing, really seeing, what has been there all along.

 

N
ow it was time to practice in the real world. I needed a destination, both familiar and unfamiliar, one that I knew how to reach by road, but not through the woods. It had to have boundaries, so that no matter how off course I was, I would eventually arrive at a recognizable border—assuming, that is, that I walked a straight line as dictated by the compass, rather than walking around in circles, which would be my first instinct. There was really only one choice, the one I thought about every time Henry and I trudged down one road and then up another to visit Harriet and Dean, the one Chip Kendall had first told me about—the route through the woods from my house to theirs.

I looked at my topo map. Harriet's house lay almost due south of mine, a short distance away, and that distance was reassuringly bounded by my road, Noah Wood, the creek behind her, and another trail on the other side of the ridge. I oriented the map on the dining room table and looked for the small black square that would be the exact position of Harriet's house. It didn't exist—like my own, the house hadn't been built when the map was drawn. No matter, I would estimate. I made a black dot, drew a connecting line from my house to hers, and laid down the compass: the Harriet Line, I called it. I noted the bearing—160 degrees, SSE—on a piece of scrap paper.

A little while later I had gathered the compass, the hiking sticks, and the dog and walked a short ways down the road, looking for an opening in the stone wall across the way. Then I scrambled across a muddy ditch and into the woods, took out my compass, and looked for the piece of paper on which I had written the bearing. It was back on the dining room table. No matter, I thought, I remembered it.

By this point I had committed about five major sins against the sacrament of land navigation. I didn't really know where I had begun—the starting point was a guess based on a map that was itself outdated—the direction in which I traveled was a memory of one of several routes I had calculated while peering at the map on the dining room table, and my attempts to keep to a consistent bearing were laughable: it was only after about thirty minutes that I realized that the proximity of my metal hiking poles to the compass was wreaking havoc on the bearings I was getting. I hadn't estimated the distance between the two houses and had never figured out what my average pace was. All of which meant that my attempt to get to Harriet's house might have been construed by a navigational expert, or for that matter, the average Cub Scout, as a dismal failure. But to me, that first foray was a thumping success.

For the first time that I could remember, I did not follow my own instinct as to where Harriet's house ought to be according to the dictates of my own permanently skewed mental map. No, this time the mistakes I made were logical ones, based on facts—incorrectly interpreted, but facts nonetheless. I knew my bearing was off because I remembered what the map looked like, even if I had forgotten to bring it, remembered that my route should not be as steep as it was, that I was headed up the ridge, not around it as I should have been. I had an image of the gently undulating lines that indicate a gain in altitude; getting to Harriet's house had not involved intersecting these lines the way you would in a straight march up rising ground, but crossing them at a much gentler angle than the one on which the compass was currently insisting. For a moment I was able to see in my mind's eye the L-shaped angle of the two roads I normally took to Harriet's house and the unknown terrain that lay between them. And that brief vision pointed toward a different way.

So I ignored the compass, although I kept it out as a kind of moral checkpoint, and walked along the slope of the hill at an angle that felt right. Before too long, I had crossed a stone wall—no idea whose stone wall or why it should be where it was—and entered the checkerboard maze of maple trees strung with waist-high plastic tubing.

Eventually I came to another stone wall, and on the other side was something familiar: the wide green meadow that bordered the woods and descended to a largish pond, which in the summer lay placidly in a riot of dark blue lupine. I knew that pond, and was always grateful when I saw it. I thought about swimming there when I was bald and wondered if I would be embarrassed if I were to face the same situation again, wondered if I would have to find out: the kinds of questions that put all the others into perspective.