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The Way Home

by Bibi Wein

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How I Found My Adirondack Home
Sometimes getting lost gives a new sense of place
by: Bibi Wein
reprinted from: Adirondack Life/Collectors Issue - September 2004


Photograph by Vincent Di Ricco

On a gloomy Saturday in March, stung by a light freezing rain that had little impact on the heavy snow cover, Bob and I took our first walk on the land we now think of as ours. We’d rejected grim mobile homes and pleasant cottages at busy intersections and old farmhouses that promised to consume every spare dime for the rest of our lives. We’d never been shown anything like this.

  From the edge of the lawn that fronted a tiny log cabin built in the 1950s we looked down a small slope to an effusive stream. The water was nearly as wide as our Manhattan street; on the other side stood a wall of stately trees—white pine, balsam fir, hemlock, cedar, red spruce—verdant and lush, all but mute about any human habitat they might conceal.

  The one visible mark of the civilized world was a weathered picnic table nestled on a little rise a few yards from the shore. That picnic table worried us. On our second visit, when the snow was gone, we descended the staircase that led from the lawn to the water, and from the grassy “beach,” we studied that lonely gray table as if it could foretell the future. Imagine that table laden with food and beer on a hot, bright day, pressed about by half a dozen people, talking and laughing, scampering in and out of the water . . .

  The property across the stream, the real estate agent told us, belonged to a middle-aged couple who used the place only once or twice a year. Their house was well maintained, even smaller than the one we thought to buy, built over a trailer with siding stained a subdued dark red. It couldn’t be seen from this side of the stream.

  But by then, it was a moot point. Bob had fallen in love with the cabin. There was an instant appeal in the warmth of the simple, hand-hewn structure and the beauty of its setting: balsam spires silhouetted on

the sky, the deep greens of winter trees against the snow, the way the forest framed a little clearing for cabin and stream view. All of this conspired to obscure the expense of the immediate need for a new roof and foundation. Most important in our decision to overlook these problems, the place was well hidden from the dirt road, at the end of a driveway so discreet we’d failed to find it the first time we came looking. It appeared to promise the isolation we prized above all else. Clearly, these six acres guaranteed privacy less surely than a larger piece of land. But none of the bigger properties we’d seen had so moved us to believe it could be our Eden. Given that there were vast wildlands nearby, we decided to take our chances for brook music and the smell of balsam.

  But either you’re in love or you’re not, and I wasn’t.

  We’d dutifully committed to paper the property’s attributes and failings. Nineteen fell on the plus side, compared to thirteen on the minus—a silly, mechanical equation I found reassuring. But my problem wasn’t so much about the cabin’s obvious drawbacks—tiny windowless kitchen, no closets and less square footage than our city apartment, to name a choice few. The problem was I loved another place, and, through our first summer here and into the second, remained secretly heartbroken to have forsaken it.

  The place I loved was less than twenty miles away. It was not a specific house or plot of land, but a great wild space crisscrossed by a few narrow, breathtakingly lonely roads, settled, farmed and mined after the Civil War, abandoned by the turn of the century, and now, at the turn of the next, inhabited only by a huge variety of birds, wildflowers and mammals, and a scant handful of reclusive humans. It was a remote corner of the town of Paradox.

  Five years earlier, my brother Jerry and his wife, Rosemary, had bought a vacation house there, and it had been our Adirondack base, bringing us to the mountains in winter for the first time. In Paradox, we’d all had countless good times together: landscaping, planting and enjoying the fruits of prodigious gardens we’d produced in the old cow pasture; wandering the valley by day or night, at every season. Infinitely generous, Jerry and Rosemary might have put up with us as part of the household indefinitely. Still, we needed our own place.

  The day we took possession of the cabin, as we drove out of Paradox with a few boxes we’d stored there, I felt a weight of sorrow I couldn’t then put into words. All through the half-hour drive, on roads we’d traveled hundreds of times, the heaviness in my heart said I would never, could never, return, when in fact I could return the next day, or any time I chose to. It was not the house, nor the extended family that I mourned leaving. It was the land: those infinite woods we could never know if we roamed them every day of our lives. Compared to Paradox, the place we’d bought felt tame, manicured, hemmed in.

  But it was not as if I had two suitors to choose between. Rather, my first love hadn’t quite offered his hand —though the chance he might one day do so remained a disturbing tease.

  Few houses of any description ever came on the market in Paradox, so we’d looked at acreage. Jerry and Rosemary would have sold us fifteen acres, but we would have had to cut a half-mile of driveway through the forest to reach it. Ultimately, this felt wrong to all of us as we considered the impact on the surrounding woods and its creatures.

  But if we wanted to buy in Paradox, we’d have to wait. Bob was impatient. His parents had died within two years of each other, and he and his sister had sold the family home he’d loved. He needed new roots. And I, with a book of short stories near completion, was more than ready for a quiet place in which to write.

  The day we decided to look beyond Paradox, we were directed to the cabin.

  There was a crucial period when negotiations were going badly, and it seemed we couldn’t proceed. I had so many doubts, I was almost relieved. One Saturday morning, as we sat at our kitchen table in Manhattan glumly speculating about the real estate lawyer’s ominous silence, I said matter-of-factly, “Look, we may not be able to buy this place.” Bob replied, “Right. But if we can’t, I’ll cry.” I knew the time had come for me to hold my peace.

Within our first week at the cabin, two things told me that we were in a place very different from Paradox. One: the man who’d built our cabin, followed by two of its subsequent owners, then several current neighbors, appeared at our door “just to see who bought the place.” No one we knew made impromptu social calls in Paradox. And, two: it was much harder to figure out where to take the mice.

  Jerry and Rosemary had been evicting their mice with the aid of a harmless trap called the tin cat. They set the trap only when they were at home to release its captives, then simply drove them around the corner, which was two miles away, before letting them out too deep in the woods for them to move indoors.

  Our house essentially belonged to mice when we took over. We caught five the first night, then realized there was no obvious place to let them go. There was plenty of wild land we could walk to, but we didn’t care to walk far with metal boxes full of mice. And, though our new town had a distinctly remote character, there were houses, if mostly set far apart on large properties, everywhere within a ten-minute drive. We understood, and not happily, that we hadn’t exactly moved to the woods, but to a human neighborhood.

  By the end of the first summer, I was sure we’d made a mistake. The real estate agent had misinformed us about the ownership of the house across the stream: it belonged not to an older couple, but to a young single man who was there every weekend with friends. The picnic table that had worried us virtually disappeared, unused, behind the summer foliage. But it hadn’t even occurred to us that the stream might be a popular fishing spot. Sizable fish were merely a memory around this bend, but such a persistent one that the road bustled at times. Suburbia, I’d called it in frustration. When people talked loudly on the bridge we could hear them inside the cabin with the windows closed. This occurred rarely; nonetheless, the message was clear: The privacy we usually enjoyed was fragile and not within our control. I didn’t think we’d stay.

  Yes, there had been some transcendent moments: Sitting by the brook, watching the light on the water. Splashing in the swimming hole and the fresh smell that clung to my hair afterwards. The way the cabin sat so neatly in the snow. The quiet summer mornings when I lost myself in writing with the early sun streaming over me. But overall, I’d spent more time and emotion missing my first love than being happy to be here. I kept scanning the real estate ads for a property I liked better, not really knowing what I was looking for, much less what I’d do if I found it.

Then we got lost in the woods. When we returned the next morning, something had changed.

  Lost. Not a dream, but it felt like one. Yet the return felt even more unreal.

  The first thing I saw when we opened the door was a flat package lying in the middle of the living room floor where it must have landed when the FedEx driver tossed it into the house. I knew the package contained material sent by my editor for a magazine piece I was allegedly working on. My so-called real life. This life seemed to belong to someone else, about whom I knew nothing and in whom I had not the slightest interest.

  Had we actually perished in the woods? Was it only our ghosts who opened the old screen door to our cabin that morning?

  “I feel like we should call someone to tell them we’re all right,” Bob said.

  I shook my head. “There’s no one to call. No one knows we were gone.”

  The clock on the mantel told us it was a few minutes before ten. Things, exactly as we’d left them, were a mess. The dining table that became a catchall because it was the only real table in the cabin was strewn with the usual unrelated accouterments of our lives in progress —a hammer, a week-old New York Times, a box of wooden matches, an empty potato chip bag.

  The comfort of our modest shelter, a rough-hewn cabin built with logs cut from the land on which its cinderblock foundation rests, had the obscene opulence of an excessively rich dessert.

  Five minutes later, I was sitting “in town” at the diner’s sunny window, sipping my second cup of coffee, waiting for bacon and eggs while Bob ran across the street for the newspaper. It seemed so ridiculously easy, life. Also absurd that we could spend sixteen hours as we had and then come back and merely resume. Were my disembodied feelings caused, I wondered, by lack of food? An insufficient flow of glucose to the brain? But after devouring breakfast, I didn’t feel any more grounded inside the body that was relishing all these routine activities.

  We drove home. I took business calls and calls from family and colleagues who had no idea we’d been inaccessible for a time, and finally, about one p.m., a call from my daughter, who phoned frequently from Utah that summer. She had called the night before, and, knowing we rarely went out at night, was relieved to find us home. “If you hadn’t been there today, I would have done something,” she told me.

  I’d been gazing out a window as we talked, half aware of the graying sky, but I was startled when the rain came, with crashing thunder and in a torrent. The telephone line began to crackle. I quickly hung up.

  Bob had fallen asleep on the couch. I covered him with a blanket, closed the windows, stood at the screen door for a few minutes watching the rain, then headed for bed. As soon as I began unlacing my shoes, I found myself luxuriating in the sensations that accompany this ordinary act, which I’d performed so many thousands of times, if only rarely in midafternoon in the dark of a thunderstorm: getting into bed. Stretching out all the muscles in my limbs and back. A pillow under my head, all the blankets I needed to be warm, I closed my eyes and let my weariness sink into the mattress. Instantly the bed began to soak it from me, absorbing every ache and twinge to leave me lightly afloat on a raft of rest, its perfection sealed by the symphony of thunder and lightning outside.

  Again, I was flooded with images of opulence. What extravagant splendor this was! Getting into bed to go to sleep. My last thought as I drifted off was how lucky I was—not merely to have such cozy shelter from the rain when I so easily might have been out there—but because I had been jarred, however briefly, from inattention and had been given the opportunity to savor the fullness of the everyday, and to descend toward dream from a deep knowledge of safety and contentment. Home.

For weeks after, however, I kept returning to certain profound feelings of comfort I’d had during the night we were lost: resting my back against a hemlock trunk after gathering firewood; then sitting by our little makeshift hearth, so simple, yet, in its way, complete. And I thought about the road, just out of view, that had led us to the farm and beyond. Out of the woods, in mind I found myself moving ever deeper into the forest.

  Nearly six months passed before we went back up the road again. There was snow on the ground, the ideal light cover that makes for easy backcountry walking. Were these the same raspberry bushes that had been in fruit on that August morning? Or were the stark canes rising from the snow just another stand of blackberries? We had different opinions, too, about which of several old woods roads was the one that had led us out. Did we emerge across the road from that huge boulder? Impossible. Surely we’d have noticed this elephantine granite relic from the glacial age.

  Several neighbors had reported similar experiences: a hunter who’d stalked deer on the ridge since childhood, the owner of the old farm, others who’d lived their lives near these woods. Each had just wandered beyond the farm one day, got turned around somehow, and having planned to be out for an hour or so meandered uphill and down for five, eight or ten hours. They, too, were still shaking their heads over how this could have happened to them.

  Several times, we retraced our steps up to a point and tried in vain to watch the tape rewind.

  I could place myself at the farm that evening, and up in the beech grove where we’d lost our way, but even after poring over maps and talking with old-timers, I wasn’t sure where we’d spent the night. I knew I could never find the hummock where we’d slept. I couldn’t picture its relation to any other landmark or sense the direction we came from to find it or took to leave it. Surely it was out there somewhere still, the nest of hemlock boughs we’d made, the char of our small fire.

  My focus shifted from our mysterious little campsite to the fact that when we finally emerged from the woods, less than half a mile from our driveway, we hadn’t recognized our road. I thought I knew this road and what lay on either side along the scant mile between our house and the farm. Now, I was caught up in its mysteries. Despite the countless times I’d walked there, I hadn’t been able to pick out a familiar rock or tree or flower at that crucial junction between being lost and understanding where we were. Most intriguing, we hadn’t even recognized it as a “real” road. Until we saw the first power pole, we didn’t know for certain that we were out of the woods.

  At the end of the looping, illogical track we’d made over sixteen hours or so in the forest, we truly had come to a new place. When the veil of familiarity lifted, our little house on our little swatch of land was no longer “not Paradox” but simply itself.

  I became preoccupied with what it would mean to know this land: to have a name for every plant at every season, a mental map of each logging road, complete with cellar holes and old stone walls. And the birds, and all the mammals—porcupines, rabbits, raccoons and deer and bear, the martens and fishers and minks and weasels, the foxes and coyotes— where did they spend the night? How many layers in the birch bark?

  Was it possible to know individually every tree larger than myself? What is that strange plant lushly leafing now in my new flower bed, unbidden? The ubiquitous wild blackberries—were they blackberries or dewberries? Probably both. As well as some (how many?) of the other variants of genus Rubus among the hundreds noted in my field guide. Is that why, as they begin to ripen, each bush looks different? When the berries ripen black, some are plump and pendulous with juice, while on other bushes, equally healthy, the fruit forms dry as buttons.

  Some, surely, can name the moment of falling in love. Not I. But it was when the familiar became strange that my love for this place became possible. And as a yearning to know the other is one of the seeds of love, what eludes knowing is its nourishment.

  With the sense that vast possibility lay at the edge of the lawn, my idea of home reorganized itself. I no longer perceived the locus of our cabin as just a suburb of a mountain village, or the bridge beyond as merely picturesque. When I understood, as I had not at the start, that the bridge carried the road away from civilization, it became a threshold from which I could explore the world. I stopped reading the house ads and began to think about adding sticks to my nest.