Living at the End of Time & Ceremonial Time

I recently came across a gentle, inspiring book, John Hanson Mitchell’s Living At The End Of Time. The story centers around the year or so that Mitchell spent living in a little cottage he built in the woods behind his former home, which became the home of his former wife. He lived without electricity or running water, had a woodstove for cooking and heating, and used a composting toilet of his own construction. It is a poetic book, moving back and forth between the alternating themes of Hanson’s saunterings in the woods near his home, the inspiration he’s gotten from the works, in particular the journals, of Henry David Thoreau (Walden Pond is only sixteen miles from Mitchell’s cottage), the journals of his late father which included long periods in turn-of-the-century China, and his somewhat strange interest in the nearby Digital Equipment Corporation complex.

In addition to being the author of several books, John Hanson Mitchell is the editor of Sanctuary magazine, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Living at the End of Time

page 81

One of the things I came to appreciate better that year was the beauty of the night sky. A few weeks after I moved into the cottage, I noticed that my night vision seemed to have improved so that I could walk up from the road on the darkest of nights without a flashlight. Sometimes I would even go for night walks to the hemlock grove, picking my way along the trail by watching the sky. The stars had never seemed so bright. I became acutely conscious of the changing position of the constellations as the seasons rolled by, and I always knew what quarter the moon was in. Some nights when I was alone in the cottage I wouldn’t bother to light the lamps. I would simply sit there in the dark, watching the moonlight spill in through the windows and the glass door, listening to the sounds around me.

There were three incredibly clear nights during the full moon that November. On one of those nights, when the moon was at its fullest, I sat alone in the dark for a while in front of the wood stove and then went out into the garden to watch the moon through binoculars. Many species of birds migrate at night and, although this was the end of the migratory season, every few minutes I would see a few silhouettes fly across the moon, and I could hear the sharp cry of passing shorebirds. …

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I could not say how much of my habit of getting lost in the woods on the ridge was intentional. Elsewhere in the world I seem to have an unerring sense of direction, but here the landmarks moved. The sun changed course; the walls and old roads disappeared. On that day I simply wandered deeper into the maze, forced my way through a tangle of brush, and then broke out into a flat ground of white pine where the floor of the woods was clear of undergrowth and spread over with yellowish fallen needles. I lay down on the soft ground and stared up at the network of branches, listening to the birds sing. There were robins and buntings and thrushes, and I could hear close by the eerie descending song of the veery. Warblers were singing from the oaks behind me; a blue jay screamed. Somewhere to the south flock of crows began to call, and then, suddenly, I heard the bird I had followed earlier. I did not move this time. I won’t say I had lost interest. But the effort of getting up from the soft bed of pine to follow its song through the snagging tangle of vegetation beyond the pines seemed too much work for so fine a spring morning. The bird passed overhead, calling incessantly, a repeated series of chips. It stopped singing for a minute. I closed my eyes, opened them, and there it was in front of me. It was a Canada warbler, a bird I had not seen or heard since I lived in southern Connecticut some twenty years earlier. The sight of it brought on a surge of memories of walks in spring woodlands. I got up to follow.

The warbler moved out of the pines into some undergrowth, and then, still singing, flew into the trees again. I tried to catch up but got tangled in brush and decided to quit. It was getting hot now, and the air was very still. Just beyond the undergrowth, somewhere high among the leaves, the Canada warbler continued to sing, as if daring me to find it, but I had a sense suddenly that I should not move. The warbler sounded out; a blue jay called, and far off the barking of crows continued. I waited. A vast stillness descended over the ridge like a blanket. I felt like a hunter on the verge of a kill, spear drawn back, muscles tightening for the cast. Someone or something was nearby.

In the midst of the silence the Canada warbler called out again, and then in front of me, not ten yards away, I saw a beautiful red fox looking at me, its tail curled around its forelegs. As soon as our eyes met, it disappeared without a sound. I hardly had time to realize it had been there; it simply spun and fled up the ridge. I stepped out of the tangle and unexpectedly found myself on the old wagon road, not far from the Pawtucket burial ground. The fox was standing in the road, looking back over its shoulder. But as soon as it saw me, it streaked up the hill toward the boulders where the Indians were supposedly buried. I could see the rocks in front of me, gray-green, rounded shapes among the trees, standing like the broken columns of a ruined temple, and there among them I counted five white-tailed deer, brown fur against the green moss, their ears turned toward me, their eyes large and curious and serene.

I waited. They waited. I stepped forward. They twitched their ears. I took another step, and they spun on their hooves and dashed full tilt up the hill, tails flashing white, hoofbeats thumping the ground. In mid-flight one of them stopped and turned to face me. It stood alone, head held high, ears pointed forward. Then slowly, as I watched unmoving, it lifted its right leg elegantly, and with all the grace of some proud flamenco dancer, stamped its hoof hard against the ground. It walked forward a few paces, head still high, and repeated the stamp, slower this time, and with more grace. We faced each other in this manner for a full two minutes, and in the space of that time a single name came into my head – T’chi Manitou. This was more than a thought; it seemed that the words actually rang out among the trees, and in fact had the deer not barked sharply, stamped again, and then followed the others up the hill, I would said that it spoke the name. But then perhaps I had been thinking too much about Doctor John’s story of the tiger in India. I went in among the boulders and sat down for a while, listening to the stillness and the periodic cries of the blue jays. There was a rustle of wind, and then a deeper quiet descended on the ridge. The sense of a haunted land was everywhere.

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By June 21 I had been living in my cottage for one year. It rained that night, a warm sustaining rain that dripped off the leaves in the hickory grove and filtered down through the tangle of wildflowers into the soil of the meadow. Just before going to bed I went out and stood in the open air, allowing the cleansing coolness of the sky to fall over my shoulders. I was alone, and below the meadow, in my old house, a light was burning, a brighter reflection of the warmer light of the oil lamps in my cottage. I thought of a flicker I had heard the night before. For some unknown reason, in the middle of the night, it had let out a long whinny from the woods beside the cottage. The sound woke me instantly, and I felt a strange sense of communion with the bird – a fellow traveler in the experiment of life, a spark in a generally lifeless and desolate universe. I felt a similar communion seeing the light below the meadow. I felt that I and my family, my friends and allies and acquaintances, were all shrinking down into the small, wild spaces of the world. I was determined to stay on.

The rain slowed, spilled into a mere drip in the surrounding woods; a cricket started up, and deep in the mat of grasses on the south side of the meadow I saw the bright flash of a firefly.

Ceremonial Time

1

There is a plum grove just above the house in which I live, a tangled, unproductive group of some twelve trees that were planted sometime in the late 1920s by an old curmudgeon who lived in the house in the decades following the turn of the century. Every morning between April and November, weather permitting, I take a pot of coffee up to that grove to watch the sun come up over the lower fields and to think about things. More and more now I find myself thinking there about time, how it drifts in from the future, how it brushes past us briefly in the present, and then drifts off again to become the past, and how none of these stages, neither past, nor present, nor future, is really knowable. Presented with this dilemma, I have come in recent years to accept the primitive concept of ceremonial time, in which past, present, and future can all be perceived in a single moment, generally during some dance or sacred ritual.

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You will not find any reference to Henry Hodgson in the official histories of the community. You will not find any references to Corky Trilling either, nor Thomas Fuller, nor Ellie Benson, nor William Patterson, Marcey Landau, Emil Laconte, or Teddy Indian. These men and women were all, at one time, inhabitants of Scratch Flat. Some of them came for a growing season to work the bean fields, some came as state charges who were taken on as foster children for a few years by the farming landholders and then given back to the institutions from which they came because they were too wild for the quiet life on the farm. Some were vagrants who passed through, stayed for a few years, and then moved on, and some were simpleminded, lonely individuals who remained on Scratch Flat for all of their small lives and died there in obscurity, unmourned and unrecorded, except in official lists of marked ìdeaths.î These people live only in the memory of the few families on Scratch Flat who employed them or looked after them for their time; and when these people die, they will drift off and join the untold thousands of undistinguished individuals who have lived and died on Scratch Flat in its fifteen-thousand-year history.

I confess to a pronounced interest in these near-nameless individuals. They are not heroes, nor are they, as you might imagine, the muscle and blood of Scratch Flat, the work force without whose assistance the place could never yield a single bushel of produce. They are not necessarily the salt of the earth; they are not anything but individuals who lived their time and who, in their time, died. But that, it seems to me, is the real story of Scratch Flat, the real history of the world.

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Obscure happy-go-lucky individual though he seems, you can find in him virtually all the fears, all the pain, the fantasies, hopes, and concerns that presumably affected Hannah Barnes, Eve Caswell, Tom Dublet, or any of the other players who have appeared and disappeared in the Scratch Flat history. He is afraid of death; he is acutely conscious of the injustices of the world; he is worried about the loss of farmland in the country; and he has mixed feelings about his marriage to Suzie. None of this would come out in an ordinary conversation with him; you must work at getting him off the subject of green beans and beer and the Saturday nights of his life; and in some instances, in order to read the story, you have to look not at what he says, but at what he does. Of all these larger concerns, it is Corkyís view of time that most interests me; not necessarily his view of it, I should say, but his approach to it. And as is often the case the view is expressed in action rather than words.

Until the mid 1970s, a corporation used to graze thoroughbred horses on the old hayfields between Beaver Brook and Route 495. Corky knew one of the horse trainers, and one year, after some fairly elaborate negotiations, was given a filly who was so seemingly crazy, so totally uncontrollable, that her owners had decided that she would never take a harness and so planned to destroy her. Corky bought the horse for fifteen dollars in 1964 and set out to train her. The local horse world was dubious, from the lowest stable boy to the owners. ìNo man but the devil could break that thing,î the trainer told Corky.

The day after he got the filly, Corky put her in a paddock behind his house, and every evening, after a day in the fields, he would go out and stand there talking to her. After some six or seven weeks, he got a rope around her neck and behind walking her around paddock; and by the end of the first summer, he managed to get her out into the fields on a lead. That much the trainer had accomplished in a few weeks, and as he watched Corkyís progress, he mocked him. ìI know what youíve done with her; Iím just trying to undo all that so I can start again.

The following spring Corky started walking her with a halter, by midsummer he got a harness on her, and by the fall he managed to get a bit in her mouth. And all this time, he was walking. Every evening, every morning before he was off to the fields, he would take her out; and whenever he couldnít take her, he managed to persuade his uncle to lead her, an old white-haired man who, if anything, had twice the patience of Corky. By the second spring he got her to pull a sulky, and throughout most of the summer, they would be seen all around Scratch Flat, a spirited jumpy horse pulling an empty carriage, led by a slow-walking black man with a gold tooth and a gravelly voice. By midsummer he was walking behind her, reins in hand; and by the end of the summer, after three years of soft words and untold miles along country roads, Corky climbed into the sulky, took the reins, and the horse trotted off in total control. For the next few years he and his nephew could be seen on deserted roads in the area, speeding along like an engine gone wild, the horseís legs pumping like pistons and her ears and eyes alert.

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I was, when we first came to Scratch Flat, still half in love with wilderness. I was still seeking the emptiness of the black hills that I used to walk through in Western Connecticut, still daydreaming of wild landscapes, and roadless places unsullied by human presence; but I was slowly changing. So was the world.

It had come to me about that time that there is really no place that is free from human influence. The discovery of lead in the snows of the Arctic, and the presence o tar balls thousands of miles from land, had undermined my hope of pure escape; and, in any case, I was coming to love more and more the idea of the sort of Jeffersonian landscape with farms and houses interspersed with wood lots. Just before we moved, my wife and I spent some time in the Axores; and there I saw, in a high valley on the island of San Miguel, what seemed to me to be an eternal symbiosis. The Azores are volcanic islands; the soils there are rich, and an almost constant mist or light rain provides plenty of moisture. The islands are frost-free, and except for fuel oil, steel, and a few other commodities, are essentially self-sufficient. The economy is based on exportóalways a healthy sign, I am told. We spent a week in that valley hiking the ridges above the town during the day, talking to the shepherds on the high meadows, soaking in the warm volcanic streams, and then walking home along the mountain roads in the evening dreaming of an earthly paradise complete with squash and sheep. Here was everythingóbirds, sky, good food, fish, butter, eggsówho needed the lonely, unproductive mountains of the American West or the North Woods? I came from the Azores determined to forge a similar economy somewhere in the United States.

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I began to think differently about Scratch Flat after that morning. For one thing, I stopped worrying about the fact that the place was, as I had phrased it, going downhill, or in the process of destruction. It became clear to me that it was simply going through yet another change and that although the place would be very different some fifty years from now, and although in time it would probably disappear from the earth as a place, it would not matter. Time has obliterated and will obliterate all the places and all the living individuals of this earth in its course, and we are living in a little match snap of light and life in a dark and dead universe and there is not much that can be done about it in the end.