Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [76]
There was, one Sunday, an ad in the newspaper with a photograph of a little house, on six more-or-less acres of woodland; there was something infinitely appealing about the picture, and we thought we were planning a sort of elaborate Sunday drive when we called the realtor and asked where the place was located. We’d just drive by, we said, and take a look, and call again if we wanted to see it. We didn’t really plan to call again; this was an outing, a lark.
Through Plainfield, through Marshfield, two tiny, down-at-the-heels towns untouched for thirty years, the road wound along the Winooski River, through bottom farmlands, past a perpetual yard sale with tables of Avon bottles and farm tools, jetsam collecting rainwater, past the great hulks of barns whose cupolas and turrets made me think of grand wooden Russian churches with their shingled turrets and onion domes. Then a turn off Route 2, a smaller road through higher and higher farmlands, clusters of little trailers (“MAPLE SYRUP SOLD RIGHT HERE”) and into the thick woods of a state forest. A few miles through the tall evergreens and birch, a dirt road intersected the forest road. To the left the road climbed to Owl’s Head, a bald dome of rock reached by a winding trail, over which mist would often hang, veiling and transforming, so that the trail became a kind of moody Chinese landscape. To the right, the loggers’ road curved further down the mountain’s slope to the little camp, and beyond it, a couple of farmhouses which were all that remained of what had once been a logging town, complete with schoolhouse and hotel—gone now, their foundations half-visible in fields of milkweed and cow-vetch, butter-and-eggs and ragged sailors and Queen Anne’s lace.
The camp was a shingled gray house, trimmed in burgundy. Built in the twenties, the main room—into which we peered through every window, circling the house in an increasing state of infatuation—centering around a wood-fired cookstove. On a built-in table, covered with old red Formica, someone had left a deck of cards spread beneath the shade of the gas lamp. There was a little kitchen sink and counter, sporting calendars and a few old prints on the bare studs of the walls, from which protruded, every now and then, a coat hook made from the hoof and foreleg of a deer.
All along one side of the house, looking out into the cool depths of the woods, which seemed particularly lush and damp, starred with large stones decked in lichens and lavish clouds of moss, ran a screened-in porch. Its heavy old furniture—armchairs and a sofa a little too broken down for home, slipcovered in a faded flowery stuff—looked like the best place in the world for a summer afternoon’s reading. On a table beside the sofa sat a stuffed robin, mothy but still presentable, poised on some long-preserved branch, and a windup record player of uncertain vintage, next to a stack of heavy seventy-eights.
Both of us are so completely smitten that there’s almost no need to go in. The realtor lives just down the road a mile or two, on the forest’s edge. She’s a salty, wonderful woman with an interesting mix of country ways and urbane savvy, who herself used to spend childhood summers in the camp, and clearly she relishes the idea of a gay couple buying it because she knows what we’ll do with it. The tour of the inside only deepens the fascination—playing with the gaslights, climbing the fold-down stairs up into the sleeping loft, where two built-in log beds and tiny windows with green shutters call up fantasies of boys at summer camp. The fact that the whole place smells vaguely of mouse piss and dampness, of musty upholstery, somehow seems just right, as does every object within—taken individually, they aren’t much, but as a whole they somehow represent the history of the house, a heady distillation of summer after summer, years of pleasure, childhood, memory, escape.
There are good reasons not to buy it. Does anybody need a second house thirty miles from home? Especially when