Fever in the Woods

I was two years old in 1979 when my single mother moved us into a cabin we called The Little House on top of a mountain in Vermont. There was no electricity or phone or running water, but its deficiencies now seem poetic and useful. We had a large room with another one just over it, and a corner above the tiny kitchen where I kept a few dolls, an antique, illustrated Aesop’s Fables, and a handful of records including The Fox and the Hound, the story of a fox and his bond with a bloodhound raised to hunt him. I rinsed my own plate in our double-barrel sink and carried in buckets of water from a brook that ran behind the yard and wound down the mountain through sycamores, birch, and oaks, just a few miles from the paths Robert Frost had walked decades before. The house was, as Gaston Bachalard writes, a topography of our intimate being. In the winter, my mother and I slept on a stiff, horsehair futon upstairs heaped with quilts; in summer, on an iron bed on the back porch. During rainstorms, I’d pretend I was on a ship in a Babylonian flood like Noah, rocking high over the earth with the last animals.

When the new coronavirus arrived in North America, when it touched and began to bloom here from human to human, I took my own three children out of the city and back in time. Recently separated from their father, I’d been living alone with them; the youngest’s respiratory system had twice gone into distress with a virus so I didn’t dare let this one near us. Our shelter was a house in the woods with no hospital nearby, no grocery delivery or reliable ambulance. But I equated the unbreathed air and miles of emptiness with a certain nonhuman security. In the absence of germs and infectious disease I chose loneliness, a too-quiet hunter’s cabin through the trees, a wasp infestation and near-wild land governed by coyotes and bears. The woods are where my mother escaped to with me; where I feel safest, and most afraid.

Without formal school, without lessons or sports was a kid? I picked currants and ate them out of my shirt pocket. I wandered around with my dog, Cher, who chased my legs back and forth as I swayed on a swing, and hunted for gophers and beetles in the grass. I pulled a frog out of a snake’s mouth, nursed a baby bird back to health in a wood box, and listened to over and over, admiring the friendship between two animals who should have been natural enemies but came to rely on each other in the face of human greed and menace. When I told my kids that I didn’t go to school then, that I had no friends or TV, no iPad or phone, they were amazed. My six-year-old, Arlo, asked if cars were invented yet. Doon, who’s eight, asked if my mother lived through the Black Plague.