I pointed myself in the direction from which I had come and started walking, feeling a little sorry for myself that I would go no further. I could have kept going. I’m sure I would have been fine. But I didn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t have even if Rosie or Canoeman or some other companion was with me. I’d come a nice distance for any walk in the woods, but I was bummed that I’d been presented with such a nice day, such a nice trail, and I was already heading back. This was the first of several incidents which would leave me asking, “Why again was it so important that I come up here alone?”
There were plenty of moments when I remembered why. Long evenings in the cabin when the world seemed to slow and then stop, which were almost like psychedelic experiences in how I found new aspects of my mind — new corners of my being — amidst the stillness. The utter silence that allowed me to hear distant grouse drumming from inside the cabin as I lay in my sleeping bag falling asleep at night. Traveling the strange paths the uninhibited and uninterrupted mind can blaze.
“…[I]n the winter, everything was still, nothing moved. Eight months of that. You can put it together. You can have some amazing hallucinogenic experiences doing nothing but looking out your window.”
~Bob Dylan, Playboy magazine, 1974
Sunday morning came and it was time to go home. As I went back and forth from inside to out, packing the car and bringing in wood to refill the rack, wet snow blew down on a diagonal from the northwest. It was a raw day. The snow splashed on my windshield for the first part of the drive back.
I arrived home mid-afternoon, walked into our warm apartment. I was three hours early and Rosie wasn’t there. I was a little surprised that she hadn’t spent the time I was gone quietly pining on the couch. I had a few hours to myself and I spent it pacing around the apartment, sitting and staring into space. I wasn’t doing much differently than what I had done all weekend. The difference was that at the cabin, I had somehow been agitated by the sense of stillness. In the city, I was made restless by the infinite action.
That night, I awoke from one of the worst dreams I’ve had in a long time. Usually, I can wake myself up from bad dreams and I always revel a little in the feeling of “it was just a dream.” When I awoke from this dream I couldn’t shake the horrible emotion that followed me into consciousness — when I said to myself “it was just a dream” my own voice responded, “no” — and I slept badly the rest of the night. I don’t know what caused the dream, but in a way it felt like the release of a lot of bundled tension from the accumulated effect of fortressing myself against the vast darkness outside the cabin the previous three nights. Whatever it was, it seemed to illustrate that the effects of such an experience can’t simply be discarded as soon as one re-enters normal life, as I had tried to pretend I could that evening.
In the week since I got back, I’ve tried to figure out what I went up there for and what I came back with. I don’t know. Broadly, I went looking for an experience, any experience, the accumulation of which are one of the main purposes of my life.
On my last night up there, I figured out how to get the radio working. (Plug it in.) It was tuned to a country music station and I was so glad for the presence of another sound that I didn’t bother to look for another station. Besides, they were playing stuff like Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline and it went very well with the setting. I hadn’t had it on for long before I found myself laughing out loud at a little thought I had. As soon as I laughed, I realized I had been very humorless all weekend and that I had not made any jokes to myself, nor laughed at anything funny (and we all know that the natural world can be a very, very funny thing). It was either a symptom or a cause of the tightly-wound feeling I had.
The music breaking the silence loosened me up, like a massage for my sense of humor. It felt good to laugh.
RSS
6 Comments
I love the photo of the interior of the cabin, how the sunbeams are suspended in mid air. I have the evil twin set to that stainless steel table and the aquamarine vinyl chairs. I’ve held on to that set for years with the purpose of someday having a cabin of my own to put it in. I’ll bet that your family has played a lot of card games around that table and told many tales while sitting there after the plates have been cleared.
As always thanks for sharing your experience with us.
PS - I’m probably crazy, based on the standards you listed. I answer my own questions and laugh at the jokes that I tell myself. The key to happiness is to never go to bed angry with yourself.
Hey dharma bum,
I appreciate your ability to clearly contrast the emotional experience of being in the city vs. the woods. Thanks for sharing the journey with us.
I really enjoyed the way you weaved pictures in with your story. I was curious about how that time away went. I’m also relieved to know that I’m not the only one who worries about pulling myself back with two broken legs and sometimes leaves information back home about where they can find my remains.
Your account of hiking, wanting to go further but knowing inevitably you’d have to turn back, reminded me of a similar experience I had once. I was on my way home from a meeting and I had some time to kill, so I stopped at Wild River State Park for a hike. It was about the same time of year. I thought the trail I was on made a loop and came back, but I went on and on and the trail didn’t seem to be changing direction. The moment I made a decision and committed myself to turning back was somehow a huge emotional release; it surprised me and I couldn’t really explain it.
Your descriptions of solitude, and its unexpected effects, are so vivid. I wonder how long it would take before one got over the tension, the restlessness, or if one could get over it.
The photos show a landscape that is very similar to what I see every day around here! Thanks for sharing your experience so honestly. Oh by the way, I tell myself jokes, and laugh loudly at them, all the time when I’m driving alone.
You know what I think. You got mail, son.
Feel free to cut and paste some of it here, if you want to fatten up the comments section! Not like I said anything that hasn’t been touched on in one way or another by previous commenters…
Anyways, well said. And cheers.
Yr comments about reading too long. Remind me of the times in the santa cruz mountains. Nothing to do. Having to learn to be with only yourself. looking at the same pond for hours. Not needing to find it interesting.
Just as it is.
Dave
It’s pretty cool to get such long and thoughtful responses, thanks everyone. Glad you guys liked it.
I like that I can post things that I don’t think are 100% complete… That are not my usual “style,” (and in fact, that I don’t have to have a usual style), that I can be embarrassingly honest sometimes, and still get such nice things said about what I post.
Cheers.
One Trackback
[...] Well, I didn’t get a lot of time to write this week, and then I forgot the little bit I did get written at home… So, no “Fiction Friday” today. But, I thought I might just throw out a couple paragraphs I wrote this fall about our cabin and land where I spent that surreal long weekend back in November. It sits on 40 acres. It is one room, maybe 24′ x 12′. There are bunks and a hide-a-bed couch at one end, a woodstove for heat in the middle, and a quasi-kitchen and table at the other end. The ceilings are not seven feet high to conserve heat from the stove. There are cobwebs and dustballs everywhere. When I arrive, a woodrack by the stove is full of big chunks of birch. The main standing tree on the land is birch and for years a couple trees have been occasionally harvested to burn in the stove. It is heavy wood that will burn long once you get it going. [...]