All Domestic Noises Being Hushed

"When winter blows upon the Aurelian mountains and the east wind...has broken the peace of the night and disturbed its quiet, then is a time to go over in the mind what the wisest men have illuminated with the sharp sword of their intellect, piercing the darkness. Fabius did just this, when he came to me as I lay in bed, thinking and meditating on such things, and as we freely talked, all domestic noises being hushed, he asked me to explain to him..."

--Boethius, Dialogues on the Isagoge



Sometimes at three in the morning I head out for the woods. Like last night. When my Chinese flashlight runs low, I stop to wind it up. It always seems that the sound of winding it will summon all the life of the forest upon me, but there is no one here. I am exhausted, because it is late but also because I drank a cup of linden tea before leaving the house. The neighbor who gave me a bag of sweet-smelling linden flowers said the tea was a strong soporific, that I'd have great dreams. It starts to drizzle just as I leave the house. That's okay, I think, though I'm not bringing a tent, I'll just throw the tarp over me if the rain continues. Though it is cool, I am sweating from climbing the big hill to the trailhead. I stop along the trail to peel off the jeans and notice I am sitting on a beehive of some sort, or at least there is a group of bees crawling in the leaves around me and taking to flight, but they don't sting. It has stopped raining. I am too tired to move, the jeans at my ankles, the bees thick and hairy buzzing around me.

Although this is the Appalachian Trail in the height of through-hiker season, the possibilities for beautiful form-fitting beds are infinite. There are no people here. I try to find something like what I had last time, if not the exact bed, that cushion of leaves in a hollow perfectly fitting my body. It was better than any bed I'd slept in, except for one in Dublin, but that was after two weeks of sleeping on trains. I didn't want to fall asleep that night in Dublin, I just wanted to keep curling up and extending in the softness. I find one similar, though with a bit of a bowl shape. Lots of leaves, very soft, at the base of a pine tree. It's the kind of place you'd be safe in in a war, a trench in the ground out of sight of anyone.

I think of it as community service, offering my body for the mosquitoes. Right up there with giving the colony of bats a place to live in the wall of the converted barn where I live. Or letting the mouse nibble at the breadroll on my counter. I bring in the cats, Mo Tzu and Jimmy the Greek, but they're useless for mice. One of the bats plummeted to the porch floor, near death, and Mo Tzu had no interest. Jimmy the Greek didn't either, till he saw its tiny chest heaving. Then he picked it up and carried it across the lawn. I followed, thinking a burial ceremony might be in store. But he just placed it in the grass and tormented it. "It's really no fun punching a blind man, Greek," I said. The bat had tiny black fingers on its hands. Its cape was crumpled. Whenever Greek leaned in for a bite, he jumped back, scared by the bat flashing its little teeth and squeaking. In India once I was reclining on my bed in the hostel when a bat came in the window and flew around for awhile. There was an overhead fan. We waited for the inevitable. Thwack. The bat fell to the floor, little body heaving. A roommate was a farmer. He took it outside and crushed it with a rock.

I realized I should have done the same, grabbed a rock and crushed the bat to peace. Fear is no way to go down. I am no farmer, but I could have gone either way. Crushing it, not crushing it. I felt very little for the bat, though its hands were so tiny. Was it the lack of eyes? I let Greek continue to play. He is so old and his life so devoid of entertainment.

Since coming up here for the summer from New York, I talk more to cats than to humans. I talk most to Mo Tzu, the black and white kitten I found under the potato chip rack of a convenience store in Brooklyn. I find myself surprised when he doesn't respond to my words, as in, "Mo Tzu, if you don't calm down, I'm going to have to ask you to leave." Then I realize he doesn't speak my tongue. The other day I got up from the floor, where I was playing with the three cats, to go to the bathroom and I walked into the closet with the catbox in it.

I dreamt last night that a black woman, tough, perhaps a gang leader, kicked a black and white cat about ten feet in the air. I went around the corner like everyone else and she had picked up the cat and hurled it 50 feet in the air against a wall, where it made a sound like a racquetball before splattering to the ground. It walked away, a little crumpled but amazingly intact. I spoke jive. "Don't be doing that," I said. "Less you want me to throw your ass against the wall." I couldn't believe I was saying it, in front of all these people, but there was a sense that I was too old now to put up with any more shit. She looked at me like she would kill me. I was terrified but trying to fake a brave face. I rode my bigwheel down the hallway, right toward her, but she let me go with a pat. Respect.

The deepest my mind can go tonight is wondering what the mosquitoes do when I'm not around. An owl just above me explodes into song with no warning. I drink a thermos of linden tea, read McTeague, and wait for the dreams.

In the morning I walk back to the trail. A through-hiker coming south to north sees me and says, "Wait, is the trail over there?"

"No, you're on it," I say.

She is Sarah, trail name Nefa, after the national folk dancing group where she met her husband. From Manhattan, living in Maine, walking with painful knees and feet, thinking of quitting before reaching the Whites.

"How bout those mosquitoes?" I say.

"The heat's worse than the mosquitoes. I just cover myself with Deet."

At the trailhead, I say, "Welcome to Norwich."

"You're kidding," she says. "That would suggest I have come 13 miles already today." She was heading for the post office for fresh socks, then clean sheets at the Norwich Inn. I think of Dublin.

Aha

I think this may be it, the secret to my sense of mild discomfort here. A large house amplifies the artifice of a dwelling. It's an imperfect sentence but it may be the best I can do right now. In other words, the ideal for me is to live in the woods with a tent or no tent or a tarp. But if there has to be a house (which there does if you want to write and stay dry and have a computer, etc.), let it be a small one, womb-like and safe, with no spaces to worry about. This high ceiling and open space calls attention to itself, and what it says is "I am not nature." The best for me was the 8x6 cabin on my friend's land a few miles from here.

This discovery started in Alaska, after several days camping, when my friend and I stumbled upon a vacant cabin. It wasn't open, but we camped on the porch. We were so excited, for the flat surface if nothing else. But I soon found myself less happy than I'd been the past few days.

What I have here is music and books and old letters. Just now I picked a book off the shelf and opened it at random. A poem by Rilke:

Rest! ... whatever happens is good. Even the bravest man should, for once, stretch out his feet, and relax at the edge of a silken sheet. Not always to ride on a dusty path. For once to let your hair fall untied and to leave your collar open wide and to sit in a silken chair, and know to the very roots of your hair the pleasure of having taken a bath. And again to learn that women are real. How the white ones move, how the blue ones feel; what soft hands they have, how their laughter sings when the blond boy brings the lovely dishes heavy with fruit.