Years ago, when I was in undergraduate school, at Penn State, some friends and I shared a house about 25 miles from campus. To get home after school took about 40 minutes in my red VW with no back seat. I left town for Pine Grove Mills, and then turned uphill, to climb what Pennsylvanians call a mountain. There was a state park on the other side of the mountain, and in a few miles, just outside McAlevy's Fort, I turned back down a smaller road, and at the mail box, started up our driveway -- something like 1/16th of mile, I think...
The house was old, and had been built in sections. The oldest portion was solid and true, and the windows shut the way they should. The kitchen, though, had been added by less skilled carpenters, and there was a distinct downhill cant to the floor, leading from the dining room table to the stove and sink. Beyond that was another addition, built by even more disreputable craftsmen. It didn't even pretend to be an actual part of the house -- it had a dirt floor, and seemed always on the point of collapse. We called this section 'The Hole', and only ventured into its dark recesses when there was a problem with the electric pump for the well under the kitchen. And even then, we got in and out as quickly as possible.
But the main roof was sound, there were two bathrooms, four bedrooms, and a kerosene stove to keep us warm in the winter. The rent was a whopping $43 a month. Split three ways, usually. Even at a time when a gallon of gasoline only cost .30, this was still a tremendous bargain, and we knew it.
We also enjoyed the luxury of near-total isolation, in our little homestead. The house had been the main living quarters for a farming family who'd sold their property years before, to a group of enterprising investors, who didn't care about the building at all. What they wanted was access to the 160 acres of low, hilly land, where they could plant crown vetch, harvest the seed to sell to highway construction enterprises who needed a convenient ground cover, and then rake in the profits. (It was only a few years after our tenancy ended that these gentlemen farmers discovered that this naughty vetch was self-seeding -- unlike the Monsantos of the modern world, these guys couldn't force their customers to come back for more, when the plants themselves were reproducing quite well on their own, thank you very much) So we only saw any evidence of farming in the fall, when the threshers would come by for a few days in a row, and move over the fields like fat mechanical dinosaurs, groaning as they slowly wave their way up and down the sloping fields.
And, as an extra buffer from the outside world, the state park I would pass, going to and fro in search of an education, actually reached all the way to the edges of the vetch fields. So there were no neighbors, besides the wildlife, for miles in all directions but one.
If, instead of turning in at our mailbox, and beginning the trek up toward the house, I'd kept on going for maybe another half mile, I would be passing the only neighbors we had. It was a large family, whose home was perhaps of a similar vintage to our own, but in a much worse state of repair. Maybe it was because their house was built lower down than ours, practically on the same level as the creek that drained the area hills, but their house, and the front porch, actually sat lower than the front yard. There was the stereotypical collection of non-functioning vehicles scattered around between the road and their front door, and it looked as though the weeds and vines were winning the battle for dominance.
I never did figure out just how many people actually lived in the house -- quite a few, I think, and in grinding poverty, to judge by what little I saw of them. Rumor had it (rumors being surprisingly abundant in an area with so few humans to spawn them) that when he was drunk, the paterfamilias would sit down on his sunken front porch, with his rifle and a box of bullets, and then set some selection of his children running down the road. The game, we were told, was for him to see how close his bullets could get to his fleeing offspring, without actually killing anyone.
As it was, the only time I ever had an actual conversation with these folks, I had been out on the old road in front of our house, having a session of plein air painting. As I was immersed in trying to channel the talent of van Gogh without the social drawbacks, I heard -- and felt -- a distinct whizzing blur of sound, and there was a tiny kick in the red sandstone a few yards uphill from me. I went and did a little digging, and pulled out a piece of lead that would have made an appreciable hole in whatever part of my body it might have met, had I been pacing back and forth for instance. I took this bit of evidence, and marched down the driveway and up the road, to that dismal house. The woman who came to the door took all the fight out of me, she looked so worn and cringing. Of course she denied that anyone had been shooting anything, even though I showed her the bullet, right there in my hand. So I had to content myself with sternly suggesting that, if they really needed to shoot their rifles, that they aim at the fields right across the road, where maybe they would hit some thistles or an old apple tree. She probably would have agreed if I had told her she needed to begin levitating on a regular basis. I don't know that she understood anything I said. But after I was finished with my unsatisfying lecture, and had started back toward home, I heard some screaming from the house, and several yelps. Something had gotten through, though what good it would do, who could tell?
Other than this single near-misfortune, our lives on what we called 'The Farm' were truly fortunate, I think. Of course, in the classic manner of the undergraduate, we had next to no money at any given time. But we saw mass dances of fireflies on damp summer evenings. Deer would parade across the snow-covered fields in the early mornings. We made tea with the rampant catnip that grew under the fir tree outside the kitchen door. We had a garden, where one year I actually got snow peas to grow. There were morels in a stand of black walnut trees. We would regularly sit in the living room at night, and sing together -- dismal folk songs that I especially liked.
Even the creepy things were sort of splendid -- there was a hollowed-out section of what used to be a county road, maybe another quarter mile up the driveway, beyond the house itself. We called it The Weird Place, because even if we were taking a walk past this semi-circle of coarse red gravel, we felt ill at ease. Some enterprising friends went digging among the few trees that grew near this pit, and found several medallions with Ku Klux Klan insignia on them.
The one simple, but to me, stunning thing I remember, from all the time I spent living in this semi-enchanted place -- the kind of place, I think, one only finds when one is young and poor, if one finds it at all -- was a walk I took, by myself, one day, just poking about in the low field down by the creek. There were small pools where yellow water lilies bloomed. There were smaller puddles, filled with masses of fat black tadpoles, swimming madly for no apparent reason. I was thrilled that, in their world, there was no strict division of levels -- no going up and down stairs, as it were -- just floating and wriggling every which way, as the transformation from wriggler to leaper began to take place.
At one point on this walk, I stopped on the bit of driveway that went over our share of the creek. There was an old galvanized pipe under the roadway, but up and downstream, the water flowed unimpeded, and untouched by human improvements. For some reason, I was fascinated, as I stood there looking down through the clear rush, by the contrast between the fugitive liquid, and the stoic white and rust-colored stones that lay on the creek bed. Long stones, graceful and perhaps gradually shaped by hundreds of years of the water's ceaseless caress. And just a moment, it was as though, I wasn't just a 26-year-old young man, with little but dreams and a red Volkswagen, standing on a dirt driveway in the middle of nowhere. I was both that young man, and I was also the stone-bedded stream, and I stood there, looking at myself. I seemed to be looking at the snow runoff, but I was seeing my own flesh, in quick time, running down over submerged stones that were actually clavicle and tibia and sternum, ulna and cerebellum and all the rest. 'As I am,' the stream seemed to be showing me, 'so are you.'
Decades later, when I look in my bathroom mirror, I do see the passage of flesh -- the steady pull of gravity, that will have me pooling around my ankles, if it has its way. But it's odd, really -- with all my distress about the inevitability of death, and my sense of shame at my mortality, this one moment, of standing on that little bridge (when I recall it) has a strangely soothing, even reassuring quality. As though I really know that it's the flowing that is most solid -- as though the very heart-breaking nature of passing, or the heart-breaking passing of nature -- the dancing of water over stones -- is both more fleeting and more enduring, even truer somehow, than flesh on bone.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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