On Brassard's Farm Read online

  I was my parents’ second child; they had lost their first in a late miscarriage. I didn’t come along until seven years later, because it took them that long to muster their courage and try again. My survival gave them more confidence, so two years later I was joined by my brother, Erik.

  We lived just outside Boston, where my father worked as director of facilities at a prep school. My mother taught photography at a community college, but only part time, so she was at home enough to maintain a reasonably ordered domestic life. Our house was full of conversation, benign commotion, humor. With their combined income, they paid off our house, I took dance lessons, and we went on vacations to Maine or Vermont. But they worried about our cars’ repair costs, rising property taxes, and my college tuition. We lived a reasonably secure life, not affluent but by no means poor.

  I mention all this because, with loving, attentive parents and a stable, happy home, I had no obvious failures of nurture or genetic inheritance to blame for my becoming a quirky, desperate woman prone to bad decisions.

  My brother was what, as a child, I called a little rat, and he later morphed into what I called a stoner, Mom called a rebel without a cause, and Pop lovingly called a ne’er-do-well. But I adored Erik, and we played a typical sibling duet: sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant, sometimes competing for parental attention, sometimes in league against them. He was “brilliant but an underachiever,” his teachers said—a fast learner who picked up any skill quickly but usually lost interest just as fast. He finished high school a year early and headed off to the West Coast and a life we didn’t hear much about.

  I went to college, graduating with a degree in education that didn’t prove especially useful for the waitressing jobs I took afterward. For a couple of years, I shared an apartment with my dearest friend, Cat, then moved in with my boyfriend.

  Four years after I graduated, my mother died of breast cancer. That was a dark time. Her absence wounded us all. Erik came back and cried hard with Pop and me at her funeral. Grief pulled the three of us close for a week before Erik left again.

  Eventually, we got as over her death as anyone gets. My father soldiered on and remarried when he was in his midsixties. I got along well with my new stepmother, Elizabeth, but I had a life of my own and no great interest in developing a deeper relationship with her. That was reciprocal, given that she had two adult children from her first marriage, who, reasonably enough, took emotional precedence over her husband’s daughter and invisible son.

  My father and I grew closer as he aged. After he retired, he acquired by degrees a certain gravitas and a stillness that made him a good listener for his daughter’s rants and confessions. When he died at seventy-three, I missed him terribly. Erik came for the funeral, but he returned to California far too soon, and anyway he had been remote for a long time. I felt very alone in the world, untethered. My stepmother inherited my father’s house and much of the money he had put aside, leaving me with no geographical axis for my life and not enough means to establish another. Besides Erik, my only relatives were an aged aunt in Schenectady and some distant cousins whom I’d barely met.

  Pop’s death made me realize how spare a landscape of familial security I lived in, how meager my connections. Suddenly aware of the importance of blood relationships, I began calling Erik a lot. Crass-sounding girlfriends or male buddies answered the phone, clashing rock and roll played in the background, and Erik often sounded distracted, in the style of a druggie. He spoke evasively of his personal life, and I got the sense his work involved something illegal. Still, he was always sympathetic in his way: Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, Annie. I gotta get out east sometime, but work here, business … you know how that is.

  At some point, I called Erik to find that his phone had been disconnected. I contacted old friends of his and did online people searches, but couldn’t find him. I didn’t think he was dead—surely somebody would have let me know, some sixth sense would have whispered the awful truth to me. I figured maybe he was on the lam from the law or women or bill collectors, or had gone back to the land and off the grid. I even searched the online inmate database for the California Corrections Department, but there was no record of his arrest or incarceration. Eventually, I gave up trying to find him. Either I would hear from him when he wanted to be heard from, or I wouldn’t.

  Yes, I felt orphaned, but it wasn’t really so bleak. While my parents’ deaths and Erik’s vanishing act made a hollow in me, they occurred within the context of a satisfying social milieu and a consuming professional life. By then I had a job teaching middle school kids at a public school in Brookline. I was part of a group of newer teachers in a demographically diverse and economically challenged district—idealists who took pride in our battle against ignorance and social inequity. We gave up a lot of free time to meet with troubled kids after class. With the school budget too tight to afford extracurricular activity, we spent our own money to pay for field trips and books and musical instrument rentals. My comrades-in-arms helped make up for the absence of family in my life.

  And then I fell in love with Matt, who did a great job of either filling, or further distracting me from, that void. He was a graphic designer for a firm that manufactured a chic line of purses, hats, sandals, and scarves that hit the marketing sweet spot among the twentysomething “hipnoscenti,” as he labeled their customer base. He was hip and smart, with a square chin, red-brown hair, and an intriguing scar on his cheek that he told people he’d gotten in a gang rumble in New Jersey. In fact, he got it when he was nine years old, by hitting his head on a wrought-iron fence while trying to do wheelies on his bike.

  We had a big laugh together when he confessed, and I loved that scar as a symbol of our intimacy. Also, it gave him a slightly rakish look that I liked. His style was a little like my brother’s, which may account for the strong sense of connection I felt.

  I really fell for him, and I loved every minute of the plummet. We got married six months after we met.

  Looking back, I see that the deaths of my parents and my brother’s disappearance nudged me into that inward-spiraling orbit toward some solid thing in a life increasingly defined by loss and uncertainty. Those losses also made me cleave—I can’t bear to say “cling”—to Matt more than I should have. And made the crash of that relationship all the more disillusioning and injurious.

  Death, absence, and disillusionment: Between them, I felt unmoored, desperately wanting not only something certain, solid, but also a departure from my life as it had been.

  But none of this entered my thoughts as I explored Brassard’s land that day. I felt only a breathless exhilaration, devoid of thought. There was so much to see.

  The air warmed as the sun rose higher above the neighboring hills. I was perfectly comfortable in my fleece jacket. Tendrils of steam rose wherever the light shone directly on bare earth or granite. As I walked I occasionally entered pockets of surprising cool, frigid ghosts of the winter just past. In the occasional open patches, where grasses and scrub held the ground, green spears of new growth pierced the snow-flattened thatch. Low-growing bushes were tipped with swelling beads of green and purple.

  I wasn’t even thinking about whether this was the right land, whether I felt the intuitive tug, whether I’d make Brassard an offer. I was too absorbed in the small facts of the place, an awareness of detail I’d never experienced. It was as if my eyes had become magnifying glasses, as if local space were occupied by a medium more transparent than air, so that everything visible registered with startling clarity.

  The knobs of rough gray granite that humped through the weave of dead grass or wet leaf detritus wore scaling pelts of lichens and brilliant green moss that looked exactly like a rain forest seen from an airplane. Small birds flicked in the trees and among the bushes, picking at dried berries left on the branches despite winter’s winds. A couple of spent shotgun shells lay on a granite shelf, their plastic red and glistening br
ass startling and incongruous. The sunlight, slanting through almost-bare branches, cast a shifting lacework of pale shadows over the ground. A solitary bottle-green beetle trundled along, sluggish with cold, on a rotten log. My running shoes got mucked, and I was pleased to punish them for their prior naïveté and hubris. The air was so fresh, I wanted only to inhale and never have to exhale.

  I started by walking along the plateau toward the uphill end. Here the trees thickened, the slope steepened. My way was often barricaded by whipping saplings, fallen trunks topped by tangles of branches, rearing earthen walls made by the upended root masses of blowdowns. Thickets of brambles encircled the little open patches, and after my first attempt I learned not to mess with them. My jacket picked up knots of burrs; my hair gathered twigs. I stepped unexpectedly into ice-water puddles that soaked my shoes. I slipped and stumbled and tangled my way along.

  I was a little surprised by all this. I’d probably absorbed too many images of idealized pastoral life from old paintings in museums. I had certainly watched too many romantic movies about nineteenth-century England, where forests were so spacious that one could gallop sidesaddle on a runaway horse until the scion of some other wealthy family dashed up on his steed and grabbed the reins. Unconsciously, that was what I had been expecting, not this raw, muddy, hard-bitten place. Farther along, facing a particularly dense thicket made by two fallen trees, I began to feel discouraged and irritable.

  I was sitting on a rock, retying my wretched shoes, when a sudden racket of footfalls and crackling erupted close behind me. I was so startled, I swear I felt an artery throb in my brain. In unfamiliar deep woods, primal paranoia reasserts itself instantly.

  I whipped around but couldn’t see anything through the snarled brush. A bear, a wolf—were there wolves in Vermont? Maybe one of the mountain lions said to hide out around here! A moose? I’d heard the bulls are aggressive and terribly dangerous when they’re in rut. Did moose rut in spring, or was it fall?

  The noise moved farther away, and though I waited expectantly, nothing devoured or even mauled me.

  Now I know the difference between the drum of a deer’s hooves, a bear’s heavier, twig-breaking tread, the measured thump of a moose, the footless rustle of a porcupine or skunk. Also the bipedal beat of a man moving in the woods. I didn’t then. I stood for another minute in heart-pounding, hand-tingling paralysis before I could resume my uphill trek.

  The scariest part—the saddest—was that in that startle and long moment of trembling, part of me welcomed catastrophe. Invited it. I felt a savage, cruel yearning for injury or death, punishment or atonement. Some kind of finality.

  Chapter 3

  By the time I married Matt, I had lived with two men and was by no means unfamiliar with the ups and downs of cohabitation. People are all a little crazy; my boyfriends were and I was, too. You joked, confided, argued, figured out the other gender’s laundry, learned each other’s sexual preferences, talked about your respective pasts. You drifted distant and then worked back closer, or didn’t. You accommodated—or didn’t—the inevitable eccentricities and neuroses. Sex was sometimes great, sometimes less than. Men coped with PMS and women dealt with fragile male egos beneath hard but brittle exteriors. And you wondered whether your bond was strong enough, your affinities adequately synced, for the long haul.

  But marriage turned out to be different from mere cohabitation. Maybe the biggest difference is, what with that legally stipulated long-term commitment, you dissolve into a collective identity. You become a sugar cube melting gratefully in a cup of warm tea. It’s not about me anymore; it’s about us. Home decor that began as an eclectic mix of two collections pulls together in a consensually determined style. Your finances merge; your circle of friends is winnowed to those both of you can enjoy or at least endure. You confide your life histories until they become a shared possession, until you’re telling each other’s stories at parties. Your friends say “you” not in the singular anymore, but as in “you guys,” “you two.”

  I let myself dissolve more than Matt did. With no family beyond my invisible brother and my Schenectady aunt, I was more susceptible to this blending. Maybe I needed sure connection or a defense against loneliness more than Matt did. Or maybe those are tendencies shared by all women.

  In any case, by the time our marriage ended I had dissolved too much and I seemed unable to become solid again. I fled to Brassard’s valley in large part to pull myself back together. To congeal, to cohere again. Given my proven, pitiful tendency for melting, I knew it had to be a solitary process.

  But this was not the only factor propelling me toward the land. From my father, I had inherited a romantic’s belief that living close to the earth was righteous and good, and the vacations we took when I was a kid affirmed that notion. We would pack the car and drive to Maine or Vermont to set up a miniature household in a canvas army tent at some state park. Campfire, hissing Coleman lanterns, showers in a concrete-floored bathroom shared by strangers, fishing with my father from a rented aluminum canoe. All four of us sleeping in the same cozy space. At night, Erik and I ran with other flashlight-wielding kids among the trees and glowing tents. In our sleeping bags, hearing the murmurs of other campers conducting their bedtime rituals, we felt an embracing sense of common humanity.

  These were the best of times. My parents lost their workweek edge and became expansive, accommodating. I loved our hikes, the white, muscular calves of my father pumping along in front of me, my brother behind me, Mom bringing up the rear to motivate stragglers. We were like a little railroad train, exploring nature’s splendors.

  Pop, in particular, blossomed when nourished by woods and sky. By the time he died, he had achieved many of the things he wanted, but finances had denied him one important fulfillment: owning a little forest home away from home. It became one of those mythological regrets built into the family identity, like Yeah, I had a chance to buy into Apple back in the day, but …

  Yeah, we’ve always wanted some land, but … became one of ours. Certainly, that yearning, and memories of those camping trips, helped bring me to Brassard’s place.

  But there’s another reason, too, harder to explain. My attempts to talk about it always come across as a political polemic when, in fact, it’s a personal confession. I haven’t a name for it, but environmental angst comes close. I mean our political, social, cultural, economic, and, yes, environmental milieu—the larger situational brine we marinate in every day. To me, it felt increasingly like a toxic immersion.

  My parents raised me to have a passion for social justice, and a suspicion of materialism and unbridled striving after wealth. They believed in respect for others, sticking by your values, practical and emotional self-sufficiency. But I saw the country, the world, mutating, moving in a direction diametrically opposed to these values. Matt reminded me that it had been doing so for decades, that there’s not much any individual can do about deterministic trends, that it’s best to develop a thick skin and get on despite them. I knew he was right, but it didn’t help much.

  At times, I worried about getting crushed beneath the rubble of a decadent society crumbling under its own weight. I had read Collapse and could not doubt that, like the Easter Islanders, Americans would cut down the last living tree just to make some one-percenter the wall paneling he simply had to have. America was fighting two ugly wars, and even our veteran friends admitted that they were unwise, unwinnable, unnecessary. Bush the younger had seemed to feel contempt for the Constitution and any dissenting citizen—easily half of America. Obama was trying hard, but his election had aroused the awful snake of racism and xenophobia that coiled around America’s heart. We ate food grown on factory farms and brought to our tables by machines burning fossil fuels. We had no idea how to feed ourselves, no connection to the soil, no relevant skills, and too little respect for the people who did have those things.

  I was by no means a rabid survivalist, buying guns and ho
arding cases of Spam. As for food, I enjoyed nothing more than a fresh ripe mango, Asian cooking seasoned with curry and saffron, tender mesclun lettuce from California fields. And beef fed on a mix of genetically modified corn, Saudi Arabian oil, and what little was left of the Ogallala Aquifer. But what could I do about it? We all knew things were going to hell in a shopping cart, and like everyone else, I soothed the pangs of this awareness with the balm of cynicism, resignation, and a high tolerance for my own hypocrisy.

  I didn’t often wail or rage about this. But it was certainly one piece of the puzzle, one of the reasons I found myself scrambling and tangling around Brassard’s back forty that day: There’s got to be a more honest, less divided way to live.

  Chapter 4

  I covered a lot of rugged ground that first day. I made it to somewhere near the upper property line—just as Brassard had said, a wall of boulders tumbled against a steep hill. They ranged in size from a microwave to a minivan, and white birches thrust up through the ramparts here and there. I was unwilling to get too close to the dark gaps and shallow caves between rocks, worried that creatures might take offense at my intrusion. It looked like the kind of place that animals hibernated or denned or whatever it was called, and gave birth. I had no desire to startle a she-bear guarding her cubs. Also, I remembered that there were copperheads in Vermont, and these rocks seemed just the sort of place they would hang out. I paused for one uneasy moment at the boulder wall before deciding I had located the upper border precisely enough.

  I headed back toward the submarine’s prow, then cut down the west-facing slope to look for the border with Hubbard’s land. At the bottom, I found an old knee-high stone wall and followed it along. Stretches of rusted barbed wire, deeply embedded in the trees that held them, assured me I had found the property line.