Seven Years Alone on Wildcat Mountain

I didn’t like doing my spring cleaning in March. March is cold on Wildcat Mountain. It was twenty degrees in the daytime, five degrees at night. Two and a half feet of snow covered the ground, and every time I stepped into the cabin I brought in more muddy slush. All through the day I dumped bags of wood on the floor next to the hungry wood stove, scattering dust and dirt and bark and moss. The time for a deep clean was after the woodburning season. But I had a particular motivation.

In just a few days, my bachelor life was going to end. Soon my wife would be coming back here, to my cabin on Wildcat Mountain. It was tight—just one room, fourteen feet by twenty-four. I would clean up my act as much as I could before she arrived. So I went through old papers, ran a duster over just about everything, sorted through seeds I had gathered but never planted in all these years (to the compost went the less desirable ones—maybe they’ll come up in future years), got on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor, turned old rotted clothes into fuel or rags, and removed pounds of dust and dirt from the inside of the cabin and put it back outside to start the dust cycle over again (the Sisyphean, domestic equivalent of the “water cycle”).

When the cabin was as clean as it was going to get, I snowshoed a bag of garbage and a bag of recycling out to the road, then went back to get some things. I needed a lot of stuff: camping equipment for our honeymoon in the Smokies, formal attire for the wedding, a second pair of snowshoes so Catherine could get to the cabin when she arrived, things like that. On subsequent trips I also removed some books and clothes and bric-a-brac. My soon-to-be wife would need room for her things.

As I returned for my last trip, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion. It was partly the look of the cabin. I don’t like tidiness very much. It feels like a denial of process; it makes things look finished, as if there were no life going on. But of course it was more than that. Cleaning is a ritual, and like all rituals it has meaning and symbolic power. It is an attempt to put an end to something and make room for something else. Now the cleaning was finished. But the tidiness was only a ritual tidiness. Things had been stuffed into drawers and swept out of sight. It looked a bit like a lie. We never get a truly clean start.

I wasn’t looking for a clean start. I was looking for transformation. And I had no doubt it would come. Things do not remain the same. And I had long wanted change—long known it was necessary and pushed for it. But now that I was stepping onto the threshold, I could see what I was leaving behind.

Seven years: I had spent seven years alone at the cabin. During that time, I had never really had a companion—no one had shared my life in a substantive way. Visitors were few. One of my male friends had made a few trips up and left a toothbrush in my toothbrush cup, but I think that was only because he forgot it. I had spent a lot of time alone—a lot of time alone. Seven years. The act of cleaning the cabin had made that time begin to recede into the past, and already it looked mythical. For seven years, if I returned to the cabin and found something somewhere I hadn’t put it, it was because an animal had moved it. It was only me and them and God, though of course when you spend time in the wilderness, “me and them and God” blur together, the distinctions having no meaning to the God who is, to use the words of Meister Eckhart, “sundered from all twoness.”

Seven years alone. Across such a span you become a kind of expert on it, in all its forms: aloneness, loneliness, solitude, solitariness, singleness, uniqueness, isolation. I am clearly capable of being alone, but I’m not, I don’t think, much of a loner. My greatest desire is always to share things. I had just been doing something that no one I knew wanted to, or really could, share.

As I stood there in the cabin, with the last things I needed in my pack, I started crying. I couldn’t help myself, thinking of all the days and all the nights, the accumulation of all those experiences, the coming into being and now slipping away from me of so much of what I call my life, here, in this one tiny little room on this one solitary mountain.

I don’t know why we cry at such moments. I only know that we do, and that when I cry like that, I feel close to the mystery of being alive—the mystery of time, the mystery of feeling the river-water slip past my fingers. We writers always want to catch this mystery, knowing that all the worthy successes in the field are here. How many times had I sat in this cabin, thrilled with some beauty or dejected by some disappointment, and ached—ached—for someone to share it with. How many days had I shaped in perfect freedom here, doing as I wished, writing and thinking and observing, chopping wood and carrying water, dreaming at night and watching the sun rise in the morning. How I longed to know it all, to let no tree grow here without my knowing it well; how I longed that someday my children should learn the stars lying on this grass, which I had sown with my hands. How I longed that mine should not be the only life to know this place. I remember one night when, after visiting friends, I parked by the road to begin the quarter-mile walk across the stream and up to the cabin. I had forgotten my flashlight. No matter: I knew the way in the dark. I had done it many times before. But as I trudged on in the blackness, I caught a glimpse of light up ahead of me. What was that? A star on the horizon? No, it was a light at my cabin. This was strange. Was someone there? As I got closer I saw it was a candle in the window—I had left it burning there by accident. And I realized it was the most animated, welcoming thing I had come home to in seven years. Every other time, the house had been merely dark and cold. The fact that I was aware of this—the fact that I experienced the moment in this way—meant that it was time for something new to happen. The solitude wasn’t a thrill anymore. It was a little sad, an outworn season whose every continuance was now a disappointment.

I imagine there are people out there who live alone in the woods for sheer love of nature. But I have not met them. All those I know came to the woods because they were troubled and bore a wound, as I did. Some kind of disconnection, some malaise, utterly incomprehensible to me, had begun to consume me.

I knew the wound had something to do with my father’s death eight years before. But he was dead, so there wasn’t much I could do about him. My father had been a problem, and I had been no solution. He lived at our house but did not work, did not clean, did not cook. He sat in the darkness and drank, yelling at us kids to turn over his cassette tapes so he could pretend to conduct Siegfried’s Funeral March. My mother slaved away, working as a cleaning lady by day and a waitress by night. I remember with shame the redness of her hands, rubbed raw from work. As a small child I developed a hatred for cooked food, because my mother had to cook for me. I would ask her instead for a piece of bread for dinner and then writhe on my bed all night, unable to sleep for hunger.

We were very poor, squatting in a house in Queens that no one cared about. It was the 1980s and New York real estate had no value. The house had no hot water. We heated a basin on the stove and took sponge baths. For warmth we dragged off downed branches and picked furniture out of people’s trash to burn in our wood stove.

I swore I would not be like my dad. I sold fake flower arrangements on the streets with my mother to get money to buy shoes. At the age of eleven, I was selling baseball cards at our local flea market. I studied hard, and my disciplined effort sent me to Regis High School and then Princeton. But whatever rags I rose from, I never sought riches. My mother had put herself in this impoverished position by an overriding disdain of all money, and she wanted me serving others, not striving to better my position in life. She even begged me, when I was going off to Princeton, “not to fall in love with money.” So I went into teaching, as my mother had in her later years.

I taught for ten years. Then my life started to fall apart. The discipline that proved me a better man than my father began to crumble. I found myself strangely moody, unable to accomplish things I set out to do, unable to understand my own feelings. I would call in sick from work and wander wooded New York parks in silence, baffled at myself but somewhat happy for the reprieve from constant labor. I got strange recurrent fevers. I drove away people who cared for me—they made me feel like him, a taker. The night my wife and I separated, I woke up bawling. I could barely breathe, the sobs so convulsed my body. But the distress was not because our love had ended or because I had driven her away or felt sorry for myself or any of that. No, it was because she had known him. She had been there in the hospital watching him die. I knew that she would move on and find someone else and forget about my father, as was natural. But no one else I could ever love would know him. He would vanish from one more place in the universe, forever. And he would never come back.

That this thought was to me the most grievous thing about my divorce, I knew, was a problem. My fellow New Yorkers recommended therapy. But I wasn’t looking for something that could be found on a couch. My problems were with God. My youth was over. I had done my period of national service in schools. I had proven that I had discipline and could contribute something to the world. Now I wanted my own questions answered, questions I only half knew how to formulate. I wanted to understand myself. I wanted to enjoy the world again. I wanted to find a God of forgiving love—or make my peace with my damning God of exalted standards. For I knew that part of my problem was that in my heart of hearts I believed my father was in hell, and the thought brought me to a place where no one I had ever met could find me. No human connection seemed to help. I would go to the woods, for as long as it took.

I had been preparing for such a journey, whether I knew it or not. Three years earlier, I had learned to drive. My mother, who never learned, was immediately suspicious: It meant I thought there was something worth seeing outside New York City. The next step was buying property. In a certain season of life, we are accustomed to consider every internet real estate listing as a possible home. Sixty-seven thousand dollars later, I was the owner of a cabin and six acres on Wildcat Mountain. It was in the Catskills, the wilderness for people who (in those days) still owned MetroCards. I told people I would develop it into a country house. It had no running water, no refrigeration, no electric service, no cellular service, no internet. There was no source of heat. I did not make the improvements, but when my life collapsed, it proved the perfect place to go. When the school year came to an end, my ten-year stint in the classroom ended also. I was in my thirty-third year, single, childless, and now unemployed. I arrived in the woods on June 9, groping my way in the darkness up to the site because my only flashlight was in the cabin.

For all the years I lived in the cabin, an absolute majority of my hours were spent in silence. If you count reading—as you should—I spent only a few days entirely without words. But the majority of my time was spent in silence: sleeping, eating, tending my garden, chopping wood, hiking. My first summer I was still getting paid—one of the joys of teaching. But soon enough I ran out of money and needed a job. I took jobs that were not highly verbal: on a maple syrup farm, where I spent most of my time in the sap woods tapping trees and maintaining lines, and at a native plant nursery, where I worked as part of a crew and got to talk at least sometimes. Whatever the job, I never worked more than eight hours a day, leaving me sixteen hours to be alone. In general I did not work more than four days a week, and usually not at all during the winter. Periods of silence lasting from two days to entire weeks were normal.

Years of silence change you. Long silence is not like a weekend retreat. It changes how you experience the world. Words diminish in importance. Nature also changes you: The human diminishes in importance. Your waking life becomes more dreamlike. For when you go outside, the woods speak the same language as dreams. When I stepped outside on a May morning and hundreds of chipmunks got up on every stump and rock in sight and chucked and chirped all at once, as if to acclaim or deride me—can you tell me whether it happened in real life, or was just a dream? When I sat on a folding chair watching the insects dance in the last sunbeams of a September evening, and heard a bear dragging a deer carcass through the woods, huffing and puffing, snapping branches and dislodging boulders—was it a symbol tossed up by my unconscious memories of my former life, or of the dying year? Or did it really happen? When so many caterpillars were eating the leaves of the forest that I could hear them chewing from inside my cabin, was it anxiety about my future, or intimations of mortality, or just an unusually large hatch? It all took place wordlessly and yet seemed to me charged with significance.

I learned from silence’s revelations. I could see how much of my talk was mere banality, and how few times I really met people when I was face-to-face with them. Yet I also needed people and needed to feel some kind of connection with them, when I left the mountain to find them. So, I learned that I needed to avoid superficial chat except as an entry point: It would leave me exhausted and alone and depressed to leave the cabin for a few hours of meaningless gossip, “the sort of conversation,” despised by Tolstoy, “which is always repeated and is always the same.” I knew from my own experience that I had in fact been stewing in my father’s death for years, while talking about politics or books or the latest news. And it became my concern, in conversation, to find the thing that a person was truly concerned with and wrestling with. Treating words with due seriousness, using them to say and discover those things they were minted to convey, is where real meeting and true conversation begin. Otherwise, we are better off with what nature provides, which is to say, silence: It feels like one of the great gifts of experience, preferable to careless words, as pure air is preferable to a cloud of flies.

I was also immersed in the physical world, in exertion, in wrestling nature to achieve even simple things. I had chosen the property because it seemed so wild. Shrouded in the silence of the woods, the cabin was a quarter-mile up a trail from where the pavement ended. I had to climb that quarter-mile with all the things I needed on my back: food, water, books. Chairs. A table. More books. A mattress. At the outset, I knew the cabin needed a source of heat, so I brought one of the two wood stoves from my childhood home. I had to saw and chop wood entirely by hand. I started at the plant nursery as a grunt laborer on the crew, moving mulch, watering gardens, transporting gravel. We busted our backs setting up rock gardens and lugged the biggest trees we could carry and dug their holes. We worked through the rain, swatted clouds of bugs, and sweated in the heat. After work I’d stop at a swimming hole in the Neversink River and take a quick dip in the cold water to wash off the dirt and sweat. My nerves and muscles were engaged by complicated motions and sensations; my body was revivified.

Without running water at home, I climbed down a steep slope to a spring three hundred feet below and filled up jugs of water. In this task, I emphatically saw the value in exertion. There were times at the cabin when I began to feel lonely and sorry for myself, returning to my bed all day when it rained, refusing to get dressed or do anything. But eventually I would get thirsty. At my body’s command, I would put on my boots and scramble down the mountainside to the spring. I would wait at the spring while the jugs filled. As I waited, I would listen to the sounds of the forest. I would meet animals there: deer, raccoons, once a porcupine and once a bear. More often I simply found their tracks, which I never saw without some curiosity. Climbing back up with the water, I would huff and puff, slipping on the wet leaves. Sometimes I would find unusual plants in bloom on the slopes or hear a new birdsong in the canopy. Not once did I return to the cabin in quite the same frame of mind as I had departed: Natura sanat, nature heals.

The natural world teaches you every day that you are small and powerless. And when you feel small and powerless you have to be more observant, to learn to live with the powers that govern you. Wildcat Mountain was not, as mountains go, particularly large: around twenty square miles, roughly the size and shape of Manhattan. On paper it looked like I should be able to follow its crest and see its curving ribs descend on both right and left, as I might walk on the back of a whale. But in fact it was not very like a whale; it was not very like anything but itself. At the scale of a man it had no easily intelligible shape at all. The ridge might divide into multiple ridges, or be blocked by cliff faces or thickets, or be flat as far as the eye could see. The topography followed no line, but turned and undulated and wandered. The entire eastern half of the mountain is designated wilderness area and is utterly trackless. I never saw a single person wandering it, nor any evidence of people, not so much as a candy wrapper or an old fire ring. Native Americans never settled in the interior reaches of the Catskills, and when white men arrived in the late 1830s, the high, infertile ridges offered neither good farmland nor marketable timber and were left alone. Wildcat Mountain is not a notable peak, and so hikers do not visit, either. Were I to be incapacitated on this ridge, the vultures would almost certainly find me before people would. It may not be much on the map, but I knew it was big enough to kill me.

At times the mountain was fearsome. The cabin was at 2,300 feet up, at the top of the ridge. It may seem trivial to those who vacation in Colorado, but heaven seemed nearer from that altitude. Clouds would gather in the valleys and hurry over my head as if in a rush to return to the low ground, and some days I would stick my hand into their visible insubstantiality. Every few weeks during the summer there were lightning storms. Lightning likes to strike the same place repeatedly. That first summer there were four strikes on my six acres, including one that hit the cabin.

The previous owner had installed a television antenna above one corner of the roof. The arrangement had seemed odd to me at first, given the lack of electric service. Electricity would be provided by the clouds. One afternoon, as I was looking out at the rain, everything flashed at once. The very air became light, a brilliant white with throbbing rainbow edges that seemed to engulf the entire mountain; the air made a cracking sound, as if it were being split open. At the same time, I heard what sounded like a rock striking metal. Then—nothing. I was alive; I wasn’t even hurt. I stepped outside and saw the antenna vibrating. I concluded that it functioned as a lightning rod and left it alone, though I never fully trusted it. Later I saw that a nearby tree had been struck as well, the bark blasted off, a crack spiraling down the trunk; presumably the bolt hitting the aerial had been a lateral branch from this main strike. The mountain opposite Wildcat was called Red Hill, and it boasted a metal fire tower peeking just above the trees. The structure was mostly invisible from my cabin, except on the nights of terrible storms, when I could watch the lightning hit it over and over.

After that first summer of solitude, I got a call from Wyoming Catholic College. There had been a sudden departure, and they needed someone at the last minute who could speak Latin. I considered it. I had never taught at a university; Wyoming is wild and beautiful; the job would be useful on my résumé. But I found I could not imagine tearing myself from Wildcat Mountain.

Something was happening to me. The Latin word desero means to abandon or separate; its past participle was used by Christians to describe the ultimate separation, the abandoned places, the desert. The late-antique monk John Cassian made a journey to the hermitages of Skete in Egypt to find the wisdom of those people who, in his words, “through the desert received spiritual enlightenment.” Except that’s only how it’s translated into English. He didn’t write that. He wrote, “through the desert received illumination of the senses.” I suspect the more correct literal translation means the same thing, in the end, as spiritual enlightenment: If you received one, you would receive the other. But the translator elides the means, which are crucial. St. Thomas adopted from Aristotle a first principle: Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu, Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses. Our senses are the gateway. Alone in the wild, naked and without words, our senses become God’s friends. Through them our soul can become his friend, too. Waking with the sunrise, spending nights in darkness illuminated by moon and stars, drinking from a spring that flows from a rock, eating from the forest, growing my own food, working in rain and sun and cold and heat, my body felt clarified, refined, an instrument tuned for a melody, a field cleared for the sowing. I could feel the seeds of a new life starting to grow in me.

What I was receiving in my extended sojourn in a wilderness of silence was initiation. It is said that the younger Scipio, in the middle of his life, had a dream-vision of the universe, in which “the Earth itself seemed to me so small, that I felt sorry for our empire, which filled but a point on the Earth’s surface.” Dante wrote with disgust of “the insensate cares of mortals,” obsessed with law, medicine, priesthood, rulership, pleasure, and indolence, “while I, from all these things free, with Beatrice was above in heaven, so gloriously welcomed.” Both men describe their visions as heaven-sent and purposeful: Somehow a cosmic vision of the whole will help them live the rest of their lives tuned to things as they truly are. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who has written and spoken of the need for initiation rites in the West, believes the key ingredient of initiation is this cosmic vision: “Initiation, first of all, is not a psychological paradigm at all. It’s not about therapy. It’s not about solving your problems with your father or your mother or how you were hurt. In fact, it just sort of leaps over those. Initiation is not a psychology: it’s a cosmology.” Nature herself will provide this over-leaping vision, this initiation, if we are vulnerable enough, and the time given is long enough. It may seem a diminishment, to be rendered nugatory by the cosmos. But the effect is otherwise. Immersion in silence and smallness will convince you that you are a small thing in something incomprehensibly grand, so vast it can swallow all of your problems as a camel swallows flies.

This vastness is combined with a beauty so widely dispersed it feels like a mystery. In the autumn, Orion rose nightly over the next range of hills, magnificent in the darkness. The maples fired red and orange against the blue daylight. In late October, sixteen inches of wet snow fell, sticking to every leaf and trunk, painting the world white. I split wood like a madman, fragrant wintergreen birch and soda-flavored black cherry perfuming the air. Every form of snow fell all winter as I sat by my stove, which I ran so hot its cast-iron sides turned bright pink. Some days the snowflakes were so small it looked as if the air had been glittered by an omnipotent teenage girl. Spring came, and I found acres of lilies on Wildcat Mountain, gorgeous small yellow lilies with rubescent throats and sweet, edible leaves.

This unearned beauty felt like forgiveness, and grace, a bypassing of my faults so comprehensive that I wished to forgive others—and even, on some days, to forgive myself. Though hobbled by all of my problems, I could have beautiful, even thrilling hours; the universe offered more than I deserved. I had marred my own life and the lives of others, and others had done no better by me. Yet the beauty of the whole remained. The universe remained beyond all desecration, and a core of me remained indesecrate with it, no matter how much I had failed.

For this is the other part of initiation: not only that the universe is great and sacred, but that we belong to it, and are part of it, and are great and sacred, too. Every time I ate a berry or leaf from the woods, it was evident that I was designed to live here. After one hard day on the landscape crew when I had gripped my shovel for almost eight hours straight, hauling heavy loads of gravel, my fingers were pained and swollen. I went to the witch-hazel tree by my spring, took its leaves, boiled them, and wrapped them around my fingers. And to my amazement, the swelling in my fingers subsided. In between my knuckles the cure was complete, and although the thick, folded skin of the knuckles slowed the absorption of the medicinal property in the leaves, they, too, improved. What were my fingers, that a wrapping of leaves could change their shape? Why should they respond to one tree in the woods, and not another? What was I to witch hazel, or witch hazel to me, that there should be this caring bond between us? Who set up this covenant between tree and man? In the end, we are kin: The sugars the plants make for their sustenance sustain us as well; the chemicals that soften their tissues or speed fluid through their veins affect us as well. And we complement each other. What they breathe in we breathe out; what our bodies evacuate feeds them.

One weekend some friends came to visit, and we built a big bonfire and drank and danced in the moonlight. The next morning we cleaned up and drove to the city. I didn’t come back for a few days. Walking up the path to the front door in the early evening, I felt something was wrong. I felt no welcome in the place—just a vague menace. I bent down and picked up a beer can that had been left on my front lawn. There had been a number of people at the party, but I didn’t remember anyone leaving anything here. We had cleaned up, too. I looked at it. It was dented, with two punctures, as if it had been bitten. People damage beer cans in all kinds of ways at parties, but I sensed I was looking at something different.

I opened the front door to find every cabinet opened and the contents of the kitchen all over the cabin floor: ripped pasta boxes, empty granola bar wrappers, broken mug handles, shattered tumblers, forks and pots and candles in a jumble. I knew immediately who had done it. The signs were everywhere. Dishes were tarred with some kind of filthy grease, and two-inch-long, coarse black hairs stuck to them. Claw marks marred the cabinet edges; paw prints darkened the white surfaces. It was a bear. And the worst of it was, he hadn’t finished all the food. Which meant: My half-eaten bag of rice and the dry pasta on the floor were his cache now. He was coming back.

I cleaned for a little while before sitting outside to wait for him. He followed his bearish nature, which I knew well enough by now, for I had a visit from a bear at least once a month during the warmer seasons, though none had ever been so rude as to enter my house before. Just as the light began to fail, he emerged from the edge of the woods, head down, as if without a care in the world. I clicked at him, and he looked up. His face was one part disappointment and all hostility. It said, “There is one of these hateful human creatures here, too.” I did not wait. I picked up a rock and threw it right at his face, then roared to shake the woods and leaped down off the porch after him. His eyes went doelike in terror, and he took off and ran like a dog. He was a young bear, and thin, and fast. As he vanished into the woods, I showered his path with rocks, which crashed all around him while I roared and yelled and generally kept up the terror.

It was a good show, but I hardly imagined it was the end. He would remember his cache and come back. That night I surrounded the cabin with booby traps. I presumed he would do what I would have done: Driven away when approaching openly, he would resort to stealth.

Just before dawn I was woken by the sound of splashing. I had blocked the approaches to the cabin with buckets of water, which he knocked over as he tried to get near the house. I woke and began roaring at him, throwing open the door and showing myself outside. He was long gone. He came back in the evening, and in the morning the next day, with similar results every time, and after that I never saw him again.

No one gave me lessons in how to teach a bear proper manners. It wasn’t the kind of thing I learned in Queens growing up. Yet I went to sleep comfortably knowing that the bear would be there before I woke. I never had to resort to a gun. I found that if I merely did what I was inclined to do, the bear would do what I commanded. A friend of mine told me about seeing a sonogram showing the skeleton of the baby in her womb. The child was made by her, she supposed, but certainly not by her intellect: No intellect could assemble a child and make it work. It was an entirely different kind of artificer that was at work inside her, an order of intellect that dwarfed the one in her mind, possessing an intimacy with life compared to which her mind was just a spectator. When we have strayed—when our conscious minds have failed us—safety is found in that deeper self, that womb-knowledge, which is at home in nature and which wants health and survival and children and feels confident it knows how to get them. As I drank from the spring and ate from the mountainside, the mountain made up more and more of my body, and as I yielded to my instincts more and more, I found nature no longer something I visited, not something that surrounded me—not just an “environment”—but something interior. I was not looking at life anymore; I was looking from it. It wasn’t an alien thing I was studying; it was home.

And so on Wildcat Mountain I came to many of the fruits of therapy, but by a different way. While in the woods and alone I did not attempt to formulate answers to my problems. I simply noted things I had done, and interrogated them later. Why, I wondered, did I want the old stove I had tended as a child with my father? There were newer stoves whose efficiency would save me work. Yet it had been my father who had bought me my first axe, who had taught me to chop and saw, to tell oak and maple from pine. I wanted to draw nearer to him. I could no longer stand doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. I had sworn that I would not be like him. It was an ambition calculated to inflict pain. Now I found myself emulating him. I found myself wanting, among other things, to be a husband and a father. I still wanted to be better than he was. But he himself would have wanted nothing less. Now I saw that I wished to be not his rival but his heir. It was the proper place of an heir not only to inherit the effects, but to put them to better use as well. His intelligence, his love of culture, his knack for telling a story, the way he approved of and blessed his children—there was much I wished for myself out of his life. Even his drinking, even his laziness—I determined I needed more of these in my life. I had to moderate them: I had to couple them with work in a way he never had. But something in me could not approve any longer of my entirely rejecting them. In me his qualities had fallen into the earth and died. But they were resprouting, and I was not going to cut them down any longer.

The Lord of these woods was a God of death and resurrection. I saw winter come, and spring follow, winter come, and spring follow, seven times. I saw dead animals in the woods spawn a host of maggots, which pupated and flew off. I heaped the dead ferns into my compost pile and drew them off as soil in the springtime to nourish my growing seeds. Every creature’s story was the same story over and over, each life just one flicker on a single great flame. They were God’s creatures after all. I felt it inside me, too, that all the dead things could come to life again if I had the faith to lay the seed in the ground.

I had everything I needed. I closed the door behind me and snowshoed out to the road. I unbuckled the showshoes and tossed them in the bed of the truck. I was heading off to get married. It would be a new life, not sundered from the past, but inhabited by a new spirit. After the wedding, my wife and I would return to the cabin and work at the nursery and grow our food and live on the mountain. Children would come, five of them, and we would move in the end to a larger house. Somehow I could see it all the day I packed up the house before the wedding, could see that God had finally made me a man who would be husband and father. And so I cried before the hearth I had designed, and the stove my father used to tend when I was a child, and knelt before it, overwhelmed by the sense of a God more inner than the inmost thing I could find inside me, and whom I had as yet only begun to know, never content with any death but bringing some new life out of it, a God so near, but always slipping away, whenever we close our hands to keep.

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This essay is part of a series supported by the John Templeton Foundation.