#1 Welcome to the Woods

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. …. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to rout all that was not life..."
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden or Life in the Woods




Sunday, March 20, 2011 The Vernal Equinox

The Wind Storm
The wind thundered throughout the night and with it my imagination. As if hitting the little cabin on the ridge at a 90 degree angle, rain came pelting through the cracks in the window despite the folded newspaper that prevented some of the cold air from whistling through. Now water seeped down the raw pine panneled wall over my head; the window at the sink was not faring much better, but at least the water dripped onto the linoleum counter below.

All I could think about was the trees leaning over the cabin, three of them tan oaks. My neighbor said of the trees fallen along her driveway, “You know we have sudden oak death here.” Well, now I know. I even plan to have those trees cut down, but the tree guy can’t make it until next week. A new mountain man friend, Bruce, examined one of the offending oaks and said, “Looks like disease to me.”

So in the middle of the night, I’m calculating the chances that the saturated ground and the disease and the wind and the lean won’t all combine just now to bring that tree down or its companions onto the brittle little wooden shelter that my dog, Cholo, and I are loving. My imagination being what it is, I can’t help but play out the consequences: It would be bad enough to have the tree crush the roof and then the roof tumble down, but I also have to imagine the window on the wood stove bursting open in the crash, coals from my lovely hot fire shooting forth, and the kerosene lamp now knocked over and bursting into flames.

Sorry, friends, to lay this fiery image on you, but such is life in the woods for a relative neophyte learning to beware of dangers we don’t face in the urban environment. When Bruce came to look at the area that I wanted him and his landscaping company to clear around the cabin, he shook his head and indicated, “I’d’a had those down a long time ago.” In fact, several other new acquaintances who’ve come to do some work on the land as I prepare for renovations ahead wondered aloud about my letting so many trees grow up so high and threaten the safety of my home. Indeed, this little tree hugger is a city girl! One of many ironies to appreciate in this story: Only an urban tree hugger keeps her forest too close to her forest nest.

Throughout the night, the wind shuddered through the cabin on its stilt foundations, tossing pine cones and branches onto the deck, moving the deck furniture audibly on my little Titanic. I decided that I would either survive or not, but I needed to sleep. I’ve been doing some reading on Buddhism and Zen in particular, thanks to my solar samurai friend Ralph; at 3 a.m. I had just copied out a passage from Diasetz Suzuki's book Zen and Japanese Culture on a cherished 17th century text on the samurai, The Hagakure:

The book emphasizes very much the samurai’s readiness to give his life away at any moment, for it states that no great work has ever been accomplished without going mad—that is, when expressed in modern terms, without breaking through the ordinary level of consciousness and letting loose the hidden powers lying further below. … When the unconscious is tapped, it rises above individual limitations” (p. 70).

In the interest of my readiness to give away my life at any moment and sleepy despite the crashing noises about me, I put in my earplugs and slept well, surviving another night in the woods. I awoke to the fog-infused and snow-crested mountains peeking behind the redwoods in the hoary yard below the cabin to the east. Such beauty, this blanket of snow surrounding me! Well worth a little confrontation with the elements outside and within. Meanwhile, the irony did not escape me that it was the first day of spring. and I’m snowed in.

Sharing My Journey

Now I will shed some light on the impetus for this adventure in the woods. In my mid-night imagining of my own demise, I thought I could at least chronicle aspects of this sometimes ridiculous journey as a woman in mid-life change (accompanied by some crisis) returns to the woods the way so many of her baby-boomer cohort did 25 years ago. Many of those back-to-landers have since moves into town to seek comforts of middle age. I too seek a few more comforts in my funky cabin in the woods, hence a battery of renovations ahead, such as fulfilling my "bourgeois" need for an indoor bathroom.

Even renovated, the cabin will still be “off the grid,” relying on solar power and a woodstove for light and heat, not to mention a composting toilet. As for electricity and hot water, they are basic elements of modern life that I have come to appreciate in more ways than one, not only because I now have little electricity during a very wet winter with an old and rudimentary solar system and no hot running water, but also because the recent tsunami in Japan leaves me with morning and evening NPR stories that make me shudder for all the homeless refugees living in tents in the snow in Japan. I may get snowed in but at least I have a woodstove and shelter of my own; I have food from the local farmer’s market that is still safe from the effects of radiation. I am well--in fact, never better--and grateful.

The process of making this cabin into a more livable environment is taking a few months. I will share some of my adventures in returning to a simpler life. Whether I can help others simply live by living more simply myself is yet to be determined, but I plan to live out the maxim to the utmost that I have often tried to embody. However, let me not kid myself about the material complexity of my heretofore opportunity-rich, jet-setting, stuff–laden, overly-educated life! Still, we can keep trying to achieve our own best selves, n’est-ce pas? If Cholo could learn to swim at age 10, then we really can teach old dogs new tricks. Born in the Year of the Dog, I am a wolf seeking her pack in the wild. Here she goes….