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By Root 331 0

’d ever have come back to the camp again. Because, as we soon discovered, it was not really such a pleasure for him to be in the woods. He didn’t enjoy the operatic thunderstorms which the mountain was prone to; one June night lightning made a crater in the road the size of a Volkswagen. He felt isolated at night, disturbed by the noises of wildlife and the creak of trees, and the endless little rustlings of mice. Even though we’d found and dispersed the great granary they had made inside the wall of the attic, and even though we’d gone out of our way to keep everything edible covered and sealed, the mice were ineradicable, and Wally couldn’t sleep because he was sure they’d run across his arm, or he’d wake up with one sitting beside his head. The scuttle of feet on the floor in the dark didn’t bother me in the same way it did him; I don’t know if what he felt was a city boy’s anxiety about uncharted nature or something else, a displaced unsettledness? Perhaps it was a family trait; when his mother came to visit the camp, for an hour or two in broad daylight on a summer afternoon, she was noticeably anxious and in a hurry to leave. She was, it turned out, worried about bears.

It was a disappointment to me to realize, in a while, that the camp was my passion, not Wally’s. Perhaps it was simply that it had seemed to represent, on those first sightings and during those first adventures of occupancy, another life, another set of possibilities—and once we had made it ours, the fact was that the old life continued. Part of the romance of the little house was the promise of safety, of tranquillity, of rest—and somehow it didn’t feel that way for Wally. He said he was bothered by the rednecks down the road, the kids who’d drive by too fast and leave a beer bottle tossed into the woods; I think he’d imagined the camp as an escape from the working-class Vermont neighborhood we lived in, but the cultures of Vermont were, inevitably, out here in the woods, too. The root of Wally’s disaffection, I imagine, was that he had other work to do. Because the diagnosis wasn’t mine, I could stand back further, practice the art of avoidance more successfully—though my passion for the place seems now a mixed gesture, both of avoidance and of reaching toward the future, of escape and of hope. I was playing, in some deeply serious way, with images of home, of inhabitation, of safety, of time. And though Wally would play with me at householding, at fixing up the place, occupying it together, his attention was, finally, elsewhere.

There was one superb summer night though, the tenth of August, the most memorable birthday of my life, my thirty-sixth. Four friends came to dinner; Wally had found antique Japanese paper lanterns at a yard sale, beautiful watery faded colors, and he hung them in the trees around the porch, with a lit candle in each one, so that they glowed and flickered romantically and dangerously. We played a stack of records on the windup phonograph—“In the Gloaming Oh My Darling,” “Indian Love Call,” bits of Verdi—and drank whiskey and a bottle of sixty-five-year-old port I’d found and saved for an occasion. Its complicated savor of plums and smoke and years made all those terms for the flavors of wines suddenly make sense: woody, fruity, resinous, deep, blooming, subtle, one flavor floating above the next like layers of silk. And it was an occasion: I was drunk, radiant, in good friendship, in love with my husband and my little house and my black prince of a puppy just now arriving at an adolescent maturity, calmly watching us eat. My friend Kathryn, who that night brought me a gift of a shrub, a forsythia to bring the cabin a flourish of gold in spring, wrote a little story about that night to read, years later, at Wally’s memorial:

We drive down a long road through the woods. It’s summer; we want it to last forever, cool cupping the day’s heat, pine trees, sun and moon together in the sky. We want it to last forever because we’re foolish and we think it can’t.

There’s a little house tucked into the edge of the woods. The door