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3 | (continued) Around the third week in May, I decided to make the move. All this time, I had not often seen the kindly brother whose house I passed each time I went to the woods. He wasn’t a recluse, but he was in his 70’s and not feeling well. And May wasn’t—I SAY MAY WASN’T SO BUSY A TIME, Y’KNOW, WHEN YOU’RE INTO SOYBEANS, EH? CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG HERE, NOW. As I’ve said, on the few occasions when we met, I found him as amiable as one might wish. Apart from chatting about farming, a subject of which I knew very close to Absolute Zero, I told him I was working, for the time being, for Boss, and sleeping in Boss’s garage. Unaccountably, considering his age and presumed experience, he found my sleeping arrangements surprising, and asked, as did nearly everyone else, if it was not too cold at night. Once again, I had to explain that I had two brand-new sleeping-bags, one for winter and one for the rest of the year, and they were very warm, once you were in them. (It occurs to me only at this moment that the modern sleeping bag is a relatively recent invention, and that a good many of the people I found myself talking to had simply never slept in one—had possibly never seen one.) The truth is, I never used both of them at the same time, even in the depths of winter at -15° F. The greatest concession I ever made, at that temperature, was to reverse their usual positions and use the three-season bag as the mattress (on top of the closed-cell foam pad), with the winter bag draped over me as the blanket. And I never zipped them all the way up; they’re simply much too warm for that, if you’re already wearing heavy longjohns, a turtleneck sweater, woolen socks, gloves and a balaclava, inside a double-walled tent.
Boss had told me that this old gentleman had a son, but I’d never seen him, and for some reason I never expected to. Yet such are the curious dynamics of small-town life, that on the very day I loaded my backpack to make the first phase of the move to the campsite, the son was working on some heavy equipment in the middle of the driveway on their property, right on my regular route to the woods. I met him head-on, just a few paces past the high hedge that marked their property line. He was tall, strong, handsome, smart, suspicious of strangers, and he wanted to know what I thought I was up to. Never was Incipient Guilt more effectually confronted by Righteous Skepticism. Standing there, wobbling around with eighty-odd pounds on my back, I was, for perhaps the second time in my life, somewhat at a loss for words. I mumbled some feeble horseshit about wanting to test my backpack in the woods, to see how it performed fully loaded. I also made the mistake of assuring him that I was Boss’s guest/employee. The immediate hardening of his expression, upon hearing this unwelcome news, spoke volumes about Boss’s reputation, even among his closest neighbors. Still, there wasn’t really much the son could say, except “get the hell out,” which he was too polite to utter, so he let me pass. I humbly did, feeling a weight of poverty, voluntary or not, that was far heavier than the pack. I really wanted to believe that he could sense my harmlessness, but he was far too preoccupied sensing the torque of a 5/8” bolt at that moment to be open to social niceties.
Once in the woods, I located the chosen tentsite again, on a tiny rise of land, and unloaded the pack, feeling, at first, about as well-concealed as a derelict in the doorway of a department store. But gradually the unrelenting quietude of the place had its effect, and I realized that apart from my presence being known, I was in fact preparing to live about as far from my fellow man as ever I had expected. I suspect that not even on my several canoe trips in the past had I ever spent a night much more than a quarter-mile from another human being. One place, perhaps, on the Wanapitei (wan-a-pi-tay), a small tributary of the French River. Someone else could easily have been snugged in around the next bend, and I would never have known, especially if he had arrived by canoe, and were as quiet as I. |
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