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1-31-2008 Jim Atwell The trip was through blustery snow, but I'd been to the site early in the construction and managed to find my way up the back road and spot the trailhead. By a hundred yards into the trees, the trail disappeared under drifts. I soldiered on, trusting to dead reckoning. Just when I thought I was truly lost in the blowing flakes, I spotted two small squares lit with a yellow kerosene glow. A few more stumbling yards and I could see the log cabin set against a big stand of hemlocks. Snow was sticking to it and covering the pitched roof. Except the wind sighing in the hemlocks and the snowflakes' faint hiss, the cabin stood in blessed silence. A sanctuary, I thought, and climbed onto the porch. Stamping snow from my boots brought my friend to the four-plank door. He'd raised a beard and grinned warmly through it. "Come in! Come in!" he said, and stepped aside proudly as I did. Well, the place was just about perfect. A single room, about 15 by 20 feet. Kerosene lanterns hung from the low beams, and from one corner a woodstove radiated heat and the smell of strong coffee. Furniture was a wood-framed cot with a Hudson's Bay blanket on it, a couple of Adirondack chairs, a wood kitchen counter with an array of tins and small boxes, a rough-hewn table with two benches. Coffee mugs in hands, we sat opposite one another on the benches. "Well, what do you think?" he asked. "Perfection," I said. "It's you, brother - roughhewn, unvarnished, homely." A big grin split the beard. "But here's the big news. I've quit work. Retired." That was a surprise. As I used to be, my friend had been a suit, except that he ran a very successful one-man business. But the time had come, he said, after 30 years of it. He'd saved money, invested carefully, had income enough for the future. "Sally's wanted to get back in teaching ever since the kids moved out," he said. "She's been in the classroom since September, and suddenly one day, I knew what I had to do. I went to the office and told the boss I quit." The boss, of course, was himself. "And what are you going to do now?" "Live," he said simply. "I'm out here in the woods for the middle of each week, back home with Sally for the weekends. Outside, I hunt, fish, track, take nature photos. In here, in this quiet, I read and write, tie some flies, nap a bit, and sometimes just sit and think." "You've turned hermit?" I asked and he nodded, grinning some more. "Yep, but one with a house and a wife to go home to." He put down his coffee cup. "But, Jim, I'm doing things I deferred for years, things I've dreamed of. And here's the weird part. When the whole thing came together as a possibility, it felt like the decision had already been made for me. It was scary, of course, but some force told me, no choice; it's to grow." He's 50, my friend, in a great, stable marriage, with two kids now rushing toward their own lives' success. He's had Sally's blessing to build his forest haven, to grow. He's doing just that, and his excitement swept me back 20 years. At 50, something had given me marching orders, made me pull up stakes and move north to Fly Creek. Circumstances were different. I was a new widower, over the worst of the grief; I was not running a business but helping captain a big college. But the command, the unquestioned sense that the move was right, was just the same. As he poured us more strong coffee, I told my friend about the creature that's come to symbolize that command for me. It's the Chesapeake blue crab. Living beside a creek down in Maryland, I grew up netting hard crabs and hauling dozens to my mother; she'd steam them in a battered pot with vinegar and Old Bay seasoning. We also netted soft crabs, catching them when they'd just molted their old shells. These went to Grandma, who flopped their limp bodies in seasoned flour and fried them crisp in bacon fat. But often we boys would net a hard crab that was just about to molt. We'd put that one in a galvanized bucket of creek water and sit around to watch. It was a process agonizingly slow for boys, and we'd often fish or swim, running back to check the crab's progress. What happened was, the back of its hard shell split from its lower shell, and the crab slowly, painstakingly, backed out of its former self. For inside its tough shell, a soft and larger one had formed for every part of it - body, pincers, legs, swimming fins, even its eye-stalks. Pulling, then pausing to rest, the crab drew forth each part of the new shell, which, after some hours' exposure to brackish water, would itself harden to house a crab almost a quarter larger than it had been. For that new creature (really the same one) had been growing, cramped inside until the command came to burst free, withdraw from what had defined its shape. That was a very dangerous time. If caught as it molted or lay waiting for its new shell to harden, the soft crab could be torn apart by fish or other hard crabs. But molting wasn't a risk chosen. It was a command as undeniable as a woman's labor. My friend understood at once. "I'll take that crab as a totem, too," he said. Again that grin. "Though I'm already partial to beavers. The years I've been hammering and sawing here, they've been at the same work, right over in the creek." Bless him, and the crabs and the beavers, too. And all living things that strive blindly to grow. Read Jim Atwell's book, "From Fly Creek - Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country" at Jim Atwell.com. |
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