Leaving the Garden

I have never liked the transcendentalists.  My fifteen year-old self—fermenting in my natural but still ill-defined conservatism—chafed against the self-professed iconoclasm of Whitman and Emerson. Years later, oddly enough, I was able to enjoy the Romantics—and who are Whitman and Emerson without Shelley and Byron, their pretentious Euro-antecedents? I chock up the appeal of Mont Blanc to its remoteness, its continental exoticism. Leaves of Grass felt too familiar, infused with the vaguely new-agey, spiritualist big ‘L’ Liberalism that was already passé for a teenager raised in the progressive milieu of Seattle. 

Thoreau and his sojourn to Walden Pond were particular objects of my adolescent scorn. My impression of Henry David Thoreau was that of an antebellum-era hippie. I remember taking gleeful pleasure in learning that his “retreat” was a mere mile from civilization, as if that proved that he was the 19th century equivalent of a survivalist LARPer. Even then I had a low tolerance for what I saw as little more than smug, self-righteous performance art, though I didn’t yet have the vocabulary or mental acuity to explain why.

I already believed his understanding of human nature naive and false—what I took as Thoreau ascribing all of the worst excesses and ills of mankind to civilization offended me, one of God’s natural Law and Order types. Did this pretentious blowhard really think “communing with nature” in a cabin by a lake made him a better person? My dislike, as is the case with so many dislikes formed in one's tender years, had less to do with what Thoreau actually hoped to achieve with his experiment in self-reliance as it did with my own childish projection of what I saw in Walden and believed it was about. I like Henry David no more now than I did when I was a sullen teenager—but at least I now have a rueful and self-condemnatory prism through which I view him and his work. 

It was not about escaping the responsibilities of society—it was about finding something outside of it, lost or as of yet undiscovered.

I sympathize with the desire to live in a cabin alone in the woods. Even if my reasons for moving to my own version of Walden Pond are different than Thoreau’s in particulars, they are the same in principle. Is there anything more human, anything that can bind us together across time and space more than the occasional longing to get away from the centers of noisome human activity, to quit the profession or trade one has been shackled to and escape to solitude, surrounded by God’s creation? Everyone has wanted this at some point in time, everyone has the moment of wavering, the tipping point. We were expelled from the Garden and so we wish to return to it. My teenaged self’s belief that Thoreau’s project was morally ambiguous was right. The garden can be almost as seductive as the snake—but we cannot un-fall, much as we might like to pretend. Thoreau wouldn’t be the first person to make the mistake of seeing a “return” to some supposed natural state as the path to moral virtue—and he wouldn’t be the last.

I couldn’t even playing at being Eve, because, like Thoreau, I am living alone, in my own 21st century Walden.

***

I am supposed to be writing a book—I am writing a book—I’m staring at a cork board covered with cards of scribbled character descriptions and plot points, some of which are color-coded with the sharpies I stole from my hated job at the department store that has since gone bankrupt (I like to think I contributed to this welcome outcome, in my own way.) I have a first draft and am floundering, neck-deep in a second, drowning in plot mechanics and “world-building” and from the weight of not having the natural-born talent of a Dostoevsky. Occasionally I toy with the idea of abandoning the novel entirely. Butting up against the limits of my own talent has increased my certainty that the end result of my labors will not be as good as I want it to be—that is, extraordinary, transcendent—and so the debate is between an inferior product or having nothing at all to show for the eight months I’ve spent here, essentially freeloading off the family who are letting me stay in this Edenic paradise for next to nothing. The latter, I decide, is worse—or at least I will cling to the hope of something decent coming out of it and make glacial progress every morning. 

This house is not really in “the country”, but as a person who has never lived in a town with fewer than 130,000 people and has lately been in a city of twelve million, to me it’s a sleepy village. There’s two and half acres of land, an orchard and a greenhouse, we’re on septic and something dug up the deer my stepfather buried fifty yards from the front door and picked its corpse clean. As far as I’m concerned, this is living in the woods. 

In my personal hierarchy of what matters most in life, people reign supreme. However I felt about animals as a child—and I definitely was obsessed with Animal Planet, zoos and begging for a dog—as an adult I have more than once sneered at my peers for treating their pets as if they were children. I love all things human. I have always lived in cities and have always wanted to, largely for the great mass of humanity just waiting to be met and spoken to—interesting, intelligent people. I’ve never had the money to actually utilize anything else cities had on offer—but the people were enough. Country living was never an object of fascination. The natural world was like mathematics or astronomy—too abstract to be of much interest.

Living in this house has been an education. I am stunningly ignorant about the lived rhythms of nature. Even eight months into this experiment and the arrival of a deer or rabbit still affords me a novel pleasure. Yesterday, when I was about to drive into town to run an errand, I spotted a doe and her newborn fawn and was waylaid by the pair for a half-hour, creeping through the grass like a madwoman, all for the closest picture of them I could get. In the evening I saw a baby rabbit duck into a ditch and repeatedly stalking back and forth over the long grass with a stick to try to scare the poor creature out. 

I didn’t speak to another human being face-to-face all day and didn’t miss it—mostly. If you live without anything long enough, you can learn to cope with its absence. You also learn to appreciate why you loved it in the first place.

Much of the spring was spent crouched by the pond and watching the frogs—in their various phases of development. It’s not the manifestation of delayed childlike wonder one might think it, which I think is the most charitable read of these exercises. These sojourns are not much different than hours spent watching YouTube videos, though the concrete nature of the physical world affords my new pastime a certain gravitas is lacking. Bird-watching is, after all, a genteel and accepted pursuit. In this case it, like my move to this house at the tip of one of Olympia’s two peninsulas—is a form of escape. Escape from the digital prison of the outside world, reminding me of the relentless, pressing obligations, real and imaginary, of dreams yet unrealized, of the crosses to be borne—everything that lurks beyond the property line.

Out there, life is stirring. The overgrown evidence of spring all around me almost belabors the point, and like a creature emerging from hibernation, so too do I poke my head out, sniff the air and try to determine which way the wind blows as I internally negotiate my return to civilization. The arrangement was never meant to be forever. It has already gone on longer than it was supposed to—but there is a part of me, grappling with the side that craves human contact and activity and novelty—that almost wishes it could. That my bank account would modestly replenish itself (I don’t want much) and that I could stay here, on my own small piece of wilderness, tucked between woods and a sweeping lawn from which you can see the harbor, dotted with sailboats that look as though they’ve been painted into the landscape to give it a sense of scale. 

Surely I would never tire of my deer and rabbits and otters and frogs? Man, after all, was given stewardship over the earth and all its animals—there was never any “entertainment” in the garden beyond them, they should be sufficient. I try to ignore the obvious banality of squirrels and sparrows, the urban dwellers one sees on every city block and has for one’s whole life, and my shrewd suspicion that given enough time I would bore of the others, too. If this is all I had ever known, I would not crave anything else, I’m sure. The phone and computer take the place of the serpent in my garden, windows into the world that had become so overwhelmingly wearisome in the past year I wanted nothing more than to leave it behind for awhile.

Then I remember that not even Adam could bear to be alone, and Eve was made to be a companion to him, and I feel betrayed by my own biblical principles. 

***

I’m not always alone. Like Thoreau, I go into town every other day or so for supplies—there was never any conscious attempt being made to isolate myself from my fellow man while living here, beyond the necessary solitude that will, by definition, be required to write a novel. I now know that Thoreau was the same way—yet another mistaken impression of adolescence shattered. The volunteer excursions are revealing. For the last several years I have curated the company I keep outside of work carefully, surrounded myself with like-minded souls—and so willingly submitting myself to hours spent doing menial tasks with people with whom I have no natural sympathy or interests in common tries my patience. I’m alarmed at my own internal intolerance, and wonder when this change came over me. Is it just that I’ve grown used to not having to deal with my fellow man, with his demands on my time and his incorrect assertions about life (which would be impolite to point out in the context of slicing vegetables for the homeless, never mind pointless) and his idiosyncrasies? 

Perhaps I’ve grown feral in the woods. I never regret these outings—but they feel oddly disconnected from my paradise—like tourist excursions into the world that has become less “real” to me than my own personal Walden. 

Before now I’ve always lived on busy streets. The three bedroom apartment I moved from into this house was the nosiest yet—situated on a bustling North Hollywood byway, quiet between the hours of two and four A.M. only. I do not miss the apartment itself—though the refurbished condo was a frequent object of envy for both the cheapness rent and size, and was probably the nicest rental I’ve ever lived in—but I sometimes think of the inner courtyard and the pool with regret. That solid, stucco late-60s building did wonders to block out the sound of Coldwater Canyon, and I would sit back there for hours—sometimes with my computer, writing, happy when I couldn’t get a wifi signal from any of the surrounding condos and could not be tempted to succumb to the distracting, mindless temptations of our interconnected digital morass. 

There was a flock of doves that lived in that courtyard. I’m sure there are doves that live in many parts of Los Angeles, but that was the only place in the city I can recall being conscious of them. They don’t look very much different from pigeons, but the sound they make—the low coo, in concert with the delicate wing flapping—elevates them to a higher caliber of bird. The doves were one of the few things I said goodbye to when I left that apartment.

A few days ago as I was coming up my driveway I saw a flock of wood pigeons that reminded me of them, and my courtyard, my own secret garden surrounded by palm trees and the geriatric Ukrainian immigrants that made up the condo board, whose conversations around the pool I was blessed to never understand. 

It occurred to me that the compulsion to seek an Eden can strike one even in a city of twelve million. 

***

My mother jokes that she “thought I was going to get into gardening when I was here.” The property is huge, and the intermittent downpours of a Pacific Northwest spring mean that everything grows wild without some cultivation. On the weekends when my family descends for their own mini-retreats from Seattle—the city they’ve ceased to recognize as their own, seeing retirement and the future as being here—they do more work on a Saturday than I probably do in a week. Healthy and justified guilt follows—I really do have to finish the book, if for no other reason than the need to account for what I was doing instead of hauling bark. I don’t share my mother’s driving compulsion to mow the lawn, as a general rule. When she’s not here to look at it, and it’s just me—which is it, most of the time—I don’t mind it overgrown.

I often think about what God meant by giving Adam stewardship of the earth. It occurs to me that my family’s labors—cutting paths through our woods and making deer trails, the tedious hedge-trimming and weeding that separates this place from a dilapidated manor in an Edgar Allen Poe story—fits the bill better than my approach of sitting around and letting the grass grow up around my ears. One day, in a fit of productivity when the words won’t come, I spend an hour weeding the planter, pulling up wildflowers and horsetails and grass. We buy dahlias for it, and salvia to ward off the deer. Every morning I check this corner of the garden for hoof prints and pull the grass that will not stop growing. It gives me something to care about. 

This was my second idea for tending my domain. My first impulse was to take care of the animals.

The sound of the frogs in late winter is cacophonous—and I grow fascinated to the point of obsession. I record them on my phone and play back the sound to lure them out of hiding with the sound of their own mating croaks. Being mistress of the forest house makes the tadpoles that arise from these late night spawn sessions part of my domain, too. Of course, though the pond where they live, breed and die is on the side of my house and visible from a wraparound porch, my claims of ownership are tenuous at best. 

They don’t need me. Not even the school of carp, a leftover from the previous owners, need my interference. When I start feeding them at least ten turn up dead, in what feels like a cruelly ironic joke at the expense of me and my capacity to care for other living beings. Never-the-less, when I see the garter snake that has taken up residence under the sheet rocks that surround their watering hole swimming beside them, I diligently keep watch. Short of killing it, I’m not sure what I thought I was going to accomplish by yelling at a snake not to eat my charges. Internet research reveals that goldfish contain some enzyme that will kill my personal Eden’s tame serpent if he swallows one, so I end up just as worried about the snake as I am the fish. In the end, both animals’ instincts for self-preservation win out.

I check my fish every day, knowing, however irrational the thought is, that if I find another one dead it will seem as though I’ve let someone down. 

***

All questions for me are moral. Has being here, surrounded by nature and unconstrained by the formal commitments that have so far marked my adult life—and most of the lives of people not blessed with this profound and unlikely fortune of opportunity—been good for my soul? Even the beauty of God’s creation that envelopes my sightline in this circular room whose windows face the orchard and the greenhouse is not an end in and of itself. Unless this “good” is oriented to something else—something, the Someone it is only a pale reflection of—it can just as easily become another golden calf. 

I tried to pray outside for a time, but found the sounds of birds and verdant greenery an intoxicating distraction no less powerful than the phone screen and other avatars of the age of constant stimulation. Some days prove better than others for accomplishing projects. The first two months of my time here were marked with enthusiasm and cheerful industry—six A.M. rises to write longhand in the still-dark autumn mornings. The day after the election I sat without checking my phone or computer, writing in a notebook, for six hours straight—probably my best day. In that time I managed to write and transcribe the first, rough draft of a novel—short, disjointed, perhaps incoherent to anyone but me and the forgiving friends I had the courage to send it to—but it was something concrete.

Outside of myself and for others, ultimately—a writer never really able to divorce herself from the act of writing long enough to enjoy the work on its own merits. But of course, those were the months of plants dying and the earth going to sleep, when the natural temptations were at their lowest ebb and the garden best matched the mood of my soul—drained, exhausted, pent-up from months of living and working in the same cage and seeking a desperately needed peace. It’s harder it pretend you’re shielded from the wilderness when all the world is brown and dead. Illusions about the need to work and the weight of debts and the ticking of the clock are harder to grasp onto. Bare branches do less to hide the view of the road.

I have little doubt that Thoreau’s version of “roughing it” in the woods had more of the rustic about it than my own, even when I take into account the relative differences of time and place. It’s not just my weekly trips to Trader Joe’s, my running water and electricity. I could have detached myself from the outside world with greater discipline—but the long phone calls with friends, the constant string of text communication, the podcasts and compulsive checking of social media—keep me far more attached to the outside world than did Henry David’s trips to town, his meals with Emerson, even what my teenaged self assumed was a cynical refusal to pay his taxes. 

And yet, I think, despite the gulf of time and philosophy between us, Thoreau and I were driven by the same impulse—natural and human, though not necessarily good, however understandable it may be. The transcendentalists thought that by returning to nature they might return to the serenity of an undefiled world. I, too, have been chasing the illusory dream of the garden from which we were banished. There is no going back to Eden—there is only striving towards the demanding business of redemption. It’s found in the world and among the people—and so I, like, Cain, must venture out and wander.

I intend to leave the woods soon. I do not know where I will go next. Probably there will be someone else in my apartment—eventually that person will be there by choice and not as a bid to split the rent. There will be toil for my bread, and even if the work is not satisfying—even if the novel, when it limps along to its conclusion, as I know it eventually will, does not lead to a windfall and screenplay option—so long as it is put aside for someone or something beyond myself, it will satisfy.

I will till the soil of my soul, and God willing, it will bear fruit—even outside the garden.