Well it’s back to the battle today

“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” —Dr. Maria Montessori

we try out some Montessori

I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, ca. 1900) and Montessori-based education. I’ve written about it here before. Although it can feel overwhelming, this sense that an entire child’s future rests on my ability to do parenting “right.” I read an article recently that questioned that thinking, that said that we should be thinking of educating children more as being a gardener, rather than being a carpenter. Basically: not worrying about it so much. Not thinking of parenting as a verb, as something that you do, but as a relationship. We shepherd our children, we cultivate the ground they grow in, but we’re not actually trying to shape them, as we would a board, into a specific design.

Yet: my struggle is that I feel like there are many things being done wrong by parents today. There’s this sense in the article that most parents do things more or less right, and that most children end up more or less okay. This assertion I question. I, myself, have struggled for a long time with something I hesitate to call mental illness, because it feels more common than that. It feels literally ubiquitous, in the sense that this cosmic unease—or angst, or a kind of low-level anxiety—is everywhere. Everyone has it. I’ve written about my struggles with depression, and I’ve written about my struggles with disordered eating.

It is, of course, that eternal question of nature versus nurture. When things go wrong with our children we want to blame nature, but when things go well, we think we’re doing a great job.

And I feel like many things are going wrong with children these days, and not just children, because children grow up to be adults, and adults and children together make society. There is much I see wrong with our society right now, much I believe needs to change. Maybe if we focused a little bit more on our children, on the ways in which their needs are and are not being met (or maybe I say so because I happen to have a preschooler) we might see some changes at a larger societal level.

I just hunted online for my possibly apocryphal article (which, I believe, really did make the case that the kids were going to turn out okay), and it turns out that the research is actually from a book by Alison Gopnik titled The Gardener and the Carpenter.  Maybe I heard about it on my new favorite (that’s a stretch—I have so many favorite podcasts right—but I wish to God they’d do an episode about Carl Jung) podcast, “Hidden Brain.”

It turns out that Alison Gopnik makes exactly the point I’m trying to make, much better than I could, about the problems with the carpentry method, and the gardening method that she supports is akin to Montessori.

Referring to the carpentry model, she says: “the main harm is that it makes the process -- the life of being a parent -- anxious and difficult and tense and unhappy in all sorts of ways that are unnecessary. And I think it makes it that way for parents, and it makes it that way for children… the carpentry story is one where you're so concerned that the child come out that you're not giving the child the freedom to take risks and explore and be autonomous.”

Even though children of carpenters can be considered more successful: “in some ways, they're doing much better. They're achieving more, they're less likely to take risks, they are less likely to get pregnant or to use drugs. But that goes with a kind of anxiety -- high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear …that is what you would predict from the carpentry story.”

So, Montessori. Although whenever I mention the word, especially to another mother, I find my listener’s eyes immediately shut down: already they’re hearing, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it this way instead.”

Which, in short, is what I am saying. But I’m not saying: worry more about how you’re parenting. I’m saying: trust your children to follow their own path. Prepare their environment, make it safe, and then get out of their way. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re doing the right thing, but trust that what they’re doing meets their current developmental need, whatever that is.

I find it so difficult to put this essential Montessori principle into words. It is, as Dr. Montessori wrote herself, the “secret of childhood,” but the more I learn about it the more I see these principles borne out by research again, again, and again, not just for children, and not in work that uses Montessori terminology. It seems to be not just the secret of childhood, but the secret to happiness, to contentment, to joy.

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Take, for instance, the idea of focus. That particular intense concentration that children use in order to grow, to explore, to learn to do the things that they need to do in order to be complete human beings. The focus that a baby has when she is learning to crawl, or walk. It is one of the things that initially drew me to the practice, all the blogs with moms showing pictures of their children with what I now call Montessori face: a look of intense focus. Of inner drive and determination.

independent baking

"We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.”  --Dr. Maria Montessori

I’ve begun to think of those moments when my daughter is in deep focus as sacred. To interrupt her, to ask her if she needs to drink some water, or to teach her how to construct a tower, or to say we’re leaving for the library— any of these things interrupt the neural pathways that she is building, the pathways that she will use for the rest of her life when she is deeply immersed in something invaluable to her.

In short, it is flow. I take for granted that you’ve read Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow? Or that, even if you haven’t, you know what I mean? Flow is that right-brained state an artist enters into when he is painting, or a writer when she is writing, or a violinist when he is practicing. Full immersion into a timeless eternal state, where one may as well not be in one’s body. Again and again, in study after study, in book after book, I read about flow as being the one essential element to happiness. People are happy in their jobs when they can find flow. In their lives, when they have a hobby that allows them to slip into that state. That old saw “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is about flow. I keep reading self-help books, and they constantly refer to the concept of flow, and how essential it is to recover true contentment. (Designing Your Life is the book I read most recently that mentioned the concept.)

We say what we most want for our children is happiness, but really we deprive our children of the concentration that brings it, every chance we get. When they’re born we immediately pack their playrooms with every possible brightly colored electronic gadget that sings and dances, with rotund jovial cartoon animals that never occur in life, with screens and noise and color and sensation—anything to distract them from the horror of life— that must be what we really believe, right?—and then we wonder why they’re unable to put their own toys away, why they can’t sleep, why they’re having tantrums, why they’re so upset. All they need is a calm, safe place to discover the world and all we offer them is distraction.

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Take, for another, the Montessori idea of self-reliance.

Or self-trust, self-motivation, self-esteem — whatever you call it. The idea that I can know myself, deeply, intimately, and believe, at an intuitive level, that I know what is right for myself. I have come back to this self-reliance in my own life as I’ve begun intuitive eating, learning that my own body’s fullness and hunger signals can be trusted. Again, it is something that reoccurs in my reading so often, especially on the self-help websites I frequent: the number one predictor of happiness is intrinsic motivation.  (Like here!  Link: "Self-Reliance Is the Secret Sauce to Consistent Happiness")

Anyone can be shamed into doing anything. It’s a method of force, like physical pain. As soon as no one’s looking, though, we’re going to go back to the thing that we really wanted. When we become ashamed of ourselves, we lose our ability to trust our inner intuition. For a child, self-trust depends on learning that the way I want to play the blocks is a manifestation of my own imagination, and of no one else’s. It means teaching children that their desires can be trusted, and followed, and that they lead where they should go.

It’s one of the things I’ve read about early-childhood education that has the most data to back it up: this understanding that saying “good job” actually subverts children’s sense of self, because it takes away their ability to rely on their own intuition and motivation.  Link:  "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson

"In short, 'good job!' doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure." --"Five Reasons To Stop Saying Good Job," by Alfie Kohn

"Excess praise can be damaging to our children's intrinsic motivation (working just for the pure pleasure of it -- not to please anyone else)." --"Break the Good Job Habit" by Aubrey Hargis

It’s so counter-intuitive, right? Because we’re saying that what the child is doing is good! We’re supporting him! We’re telling her she SHOULD trust herself! Aye, there’s the rub: US adults, from the outside, telling children what to do, what’s good, what’s bad, instead of allowing them to discover the world for themselves.

The reason we don’t say good job is not because we don’t think our children are doing a good job. It’s because we don’t want them to be reliant on other people to think that they’re doing a good job. We want that sense of satisfaction to come from inside, rather than from outside.

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely."  --Alfie Kohn

I continue to struggle with praise as an adult, as a writer. All I want as a writer is external validation. In the form of publication, or an agent or an editor telling me that my words are worthy of reproduction. In the form of money. In the form of an audience, of you, reading these words. It’s not enough for me simply to write them, to produce them for the joy they give me, the sense I have of order coalescing as I organize my sentences. I want you, reader, to tell me “good job.” Preferably in the comments.

So. Is it any surprise that I want something different for my daughter? Something different than what was given to us by our parents, and what I’ve consistently watched other people give their children: shame, and guilt, and constant reliance on external validation.

A brief story: we toured a Montessori school (Bridgeview Montessori) and the director said that she’d sent her daughter to Montessori preschool, but then to kindergarten at a traditional school. When she and her husband figured out that it wasn’t working for their daughter, they brought her back into Montessori school.  Even in that one brief year, she had unlearned this ability to trust her own intuition, her reliance on intrinsic motivation, her own inner sense of self. The girl would bring her drawings up to the teacher and say: isn’t this good? Is this what you wanted? Is this how it should be colored?

The Montessori-trained teacher would have to answer: what do YOU think? Is it good for you? Is that how you wanted your drawing to come out? Can you talk to me about it?

That’s after one year. Only one year of traditional school.

“...it's particularly ironic because school was actually designed as part of trying to get people trained for an industrial world. In a sense, school was designed to make robots, in that it gave people skills that now robots are capable of doing. And in a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need -- innovation, creativity, risk-taking -- are exactly the ones that we're not encouraging.”  --Alison Gopnik

When I say I want this self-trust for myself, I mean that I’m thinking of starting remedial Montessori workshops for adults. Because I have 41 years of that kind of programming to counteract. It’s why yoga has been my heart-song for the last however many years. In yoga, the teacher says: allow your body to be what it is today. Listen to your body, the same way in Montessori we say: follow the child. In yoga, the lights are off and I’m on my mat myself, no one to impress, no teacher to show off for. Even though 99 percent of the time, I’m thinking: did that impress her? Or: oh no, I’m not doing it right.

The other crazy thing about Montessori is how it actually works. Every principle that I’ve taken seriously and implemented consistently has had unforeseen benefits and astonishing success. It works.

The irony is that articles about teenagers all essentially say the same things. Have good boundaries and agreed-upon limits with your children. (Montessori: freedom within limits.) Teach them how to do things themselves rather than doing them for them. Give them autonomy and responsibility rather than helicoptering all over the place. It seems like so much of what we’ve done with the millennial generation, all the evils that are blamed on them, is exactly the opposite: our fault. The boomers, the Karens. We’ve given them no freedom--not to go outdoors, or to get jobs, or to hang out with their friends--and instead have given them limitless addictive technology that may literally be killing their brains.  ("God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” says Sean Parker, Facebook's first president.)

"...that parent can take on the most important role of parenting, that of teaching the child to take care of himself by demonstrating how it is done."  --"When It's Time for Them To Get a Life," by Jim Fay

"An emerging adult who takes the time to deeply reflect and raise their own self-awareness about their innermost desires can be guided by them if they have at least some clues from listening to who they are and what they value.”  --"How To Help My Young Adult Find Their Purpose," by Jennifer Miller

"While some parents may think that they are helping their children to make better decisions and to fix the consequences of their actions, research has shown that parental codependency may alienate children from their own feelings and distance them from self-determination. Ultimately, parents may want to consider setting up boundaries for their children, and also for themselves."  --"Failure to Launch," by Mark Banschick

I become more and more frustrated because not everyone shares this view. The first two essential parts of Montessori education are prepared caregivers and a prepared environment, and I fear I am giving my daughter neither. I do my best, but I’ve been taught to be a voiceless people-pleaser my whole life, and despite my attempts to the contrary, I am not always finding the courage to speak up in favor of autonomy, and joy, and creative freedom, for her or for myself. Plus, these things are effing expensive. I applied for financial aid at a local Montessori school and was told that their financial aid maxes out at 30 percent, meaning if we were to qualify for the maximum, and send Sagan to school part-time for three days a week, school would still cost $5000 a year. This, despite Dr. Maria Montessori explicitly designing the method for poor children.

Then I read the data about how important Montessori is, and how it’s even more effective when children come from disadvantaged or impoverished backgrounds.  It can erase differences between income levels.  “The difference in academic achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end of the study," says the National Institutes of Health.  "The Montessori Method is not only superior to all alternatives, but categorically so," says America Magazine, in this article.  "The scientific link between executive function and school success couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and classrooms of our youngest learners," says Mind in the Making, a nonprofit founded by Jeff Bezos (himself a Montessori alum).  

Still, despite the evidence of these and many other studies, education in this country is not based on science. Nothing in our country is based on actual scientific data, least of all the precious minds of our most vulnerable. As a country, we continue to use outmoded, outdated, hundreds-of-years-old traditional pedagogy.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the elementary school in our community be torn down and rebuilt with a $90 million state grant. Money that would pay for 1400 teachers, or to retrofit our public school into a Montessori one, as this low-income school in rural South Carolina did.  (Link:  "Public School Makes the Case for Montessori for All.) It feels like a purposeful attempt to ignore the reality of what is involved in good education for all children. Because a well-educated populace would mean that people have the courage to become active. They wouldn’t be consumed by anxiety and diseases of despair, cocooned inside their houses and their devices. Freedom means the courage to take action: against climate change, against racism, against children’s concentration camps.

“How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: 'your will must disappear and mine prevail!'—how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?”  --Dr. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World

Might as well keep going now

Courtesy of s/v Estrellita 5.10b

Okay, so I’m going to move on to what I’m supposed to be working on and writing about:  the boat.

Spirit, not at sea

A boat under progress is not very photogenic.  Note the pine needles, the antifreeze bottles full of tap water  used as weights, the carelessly hung rags and ratchet straps and cleaning accoutrements.  Doing boat work in the middle of a pine forest is likewise not very easy.  Every day starts with clearing the pine needles from whatever needs to be worked on.

I am resentful and angry about boat work.  I didn’t want to buy a boat.  I was happy with my little farmstead and office in Maine, and I was burned so badly by the last boat that I didn’t think I could ever trust a new boat.  I remember how my heart broke last time.

I remember that the day-to-day reality of boat life involves mammoth amounts of brute physical labor.  Cleaning.  Plumbing maintenance.  Cooking with limited ingredients and space.

And still I want to sail, not because I actually want to sail, but because I am still hungry for adventure, for travel, because my peripatetic urge is never satisfied.  I want to cross an ocean.  I want to drop luffing sails in the harbor of the Azores.  I want to traverse the Suez and Panama Canals, cruise the Mediterranean, round the great Capes, cross from Newfoundland to Ireland.  These are things I hunger after.

In Stephen King’s “On Writing” he says, of his wife:

In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tie-breaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.

As with a writing life, what really matters in cruising is who you choose to do it with.  I know, from meeting many grounded sailors, that what most often gets in the way of achieving a sailing dream is not hurricanes, or pirates, or broaching whales—but unwilling partners.  Your feet get tied up to the ground, not by roots, but by people.

And now I am one of those people.

I believe that the thing that entranced so many [elderly, male, ex-] sailors about the voyage of sailing vessel Secret is that I—the nubile female blog heroine—wanted so desperately to keep sailing and my partner did not.

This indecision has been a problem for a long time between us.

A Wharram catamaran sings her siren song for me, at her port in Phuket.  So does the idea of a beach camping cruise along the Mexican coast.  The Continental Divide Trail.  Cyprus, where my grandfather is from.  Bangkok, always.  Not to mention the best gift K. ever gave me, a writing room.  Again, King:  “Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.”

Also, famously, he said:  “Write with the door closed.”

Virginia Woolf, much more famously, said:  “All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”

Worst of all, I remember that a boat has no door that closes.

[Well, there’s a head, smelling of holding tank, but certainly not a private writing room, not a place where you go to dream.]

I’ve been reading boat blogs, trying to get a handle again on this life that I’m not sure I’ve quite chosen again, and all of the sunniest cruising and travel blogs open with whimsical romantic stories of carpenters meeting bookworms, or spur-of-the-moment decisions over beer and pizza, or one partner convincing the other that what they really needed was a sailboat:

“I have long had a dream of going cruising in a sailboat and have gradually lured Mark into this dream.  His response has ranged from all smiles to the rare bout of kicking and screaming, but he finally agreed to purchase a boat a year ago.”  —s/v Groovy

“In May 2011 Tammara and I made the decision to purchase a sailboat to sail and live on and eventually take her down the west coast…  It is our dream to one day voyage across oceans to distant and foreign lands.  We hope to achieve this with our new boat.”  —s/v Lynn-Marie

“Have you ever dreamt of running away to live on a tropical island, spending your days basking in the warm sunshine while sipping piña coladas? We have. In fact, our dream included running away to live on a sailboat in the tropics, even though when we started we had never even sailed before!  Zero to Cruising is the story of how we took that dream and made it a reality. Follow along... you can do it too!”  --s/v Zero to Cruising

“Our goal is to share meaningful thoughts on simple living, to help sailors with life aboard, and to inspire others to chase their own creative dream through honest and uplifting writing.”  —s/v Sailing Simplicity

I find that so much of actual life aboard—which is constant interpersonal decision-making—gets left out of these blogs.

Then there’s the much more honest s/v More Joy Everywhere, posting shortly before deciding to sell:

“These blogs are all written by people who are younger and prettier and smarter and more creative than we are.  They fix engines, install solar panels, sew cushions, grow sprouts, revarnish their teak, and understand how their systems work.  In their spare time, they sketch, make jewelry, write poetry, play the banjo, kayak, scuba dive, take fabulous underwater pictures, and never watch television.”

It’s easy to paint a romantic vision of life aboard—all sunsets and dolphins and glowing teak and tranquil anchorages.  It’s easy, when one is parsing a life a post or two at a time, to focus only on the beautiful things.  It’s why everyone, in our age of social networks, has a chronic diagnosis of FOMO.  We see everyone else’s gorgeous handmade children’s crafts, or snapshots of family vacations—we don’t see the dirty dishes, the arguments, the days spent in front of the television, the exhaustion, the chaos.

Some of the most inspirational and optimistic blogs drift slowly off into the ether with no explanation as to what exactly happened to the pina colada dream.  Some others, as with the second example above, have posts stop soon before the Sailboat Listing appears.  [Click here for a great collection of blog posts about cruisers who decide to quit.]

You’ll know, if you’ve read for a long time, that I love to write about being covered in poison oak, or boat poop explosions, or frigid Maine winters.  It’s the part of life that’s interesting to me.  What interests me about life—what interests me about travel—what interests me in literature and film and art—are the things that are difficult, the things that are hard, the challenges remaining to be overcome.

I know that I want to write, as I’ve always known, but as I said to Karl, when we first met:  I can do that anywhere.

He asked me what I did for a living, what I was, and I said:  a bum.

He asked me to live aboard a boat with him, on our first date, and I said, with no hesitation:  yes.


Sailing is a full-time job.  Boat work is a full-time job.  Writing, too, is a full-time job.  So what then?  I wrestle what time I can from the ether, and I use it to put words on paper, or onto a screen, or I stare into space and avoid putting words on paper or onscreen.  I miss my grandmother’s typewriter.  I miss my office and my desk and my view of the drained beaver pond.  I miss my literary dog and cat.

Can I really do it anywhere?  I guess we’ll find out.

And I guess, dear reader, you can always trust me, yours truly, to delve my hands deep down into the dirty painful nitty gritty of life, can you not?  I commit to you that I’ll continue to explore the dark side of life afoot or a-sail—at least a sunny post or two a month at a time.

Break

Weekday regatta at Mattapoisett Harbor

August is a good month to spend in Massachusetts.  There are regattas.  There is alleged sunshine, more than the rest of the year, at least.  There are clam bakes and fresh oysters and fluke sushi and better lobster than in Maine, if you can get your fingers into any.

Light at Mattapoisett

There are camping trips and sailing on ponds.  There are bonfires.  There is precious little swimming.  There is chilly yoga in sunlit patches.  There are car shows.  There are rainbows and sunsets and lighthouses.

Authentic New England clambake at the Marion VFW

The clam bake I refer to was especially spectacular.  It is impossible to sufficiently rave about the seafood around here, and how cavalier the locals are about its deliciousness.  New Bedford, less than ten miles away, whence both Ishmael and Herman Melville sailed, is still the largest working seaport in the United States in terms of volume of seafood caught.  The shellfish here, I would wager, are the best in the world.  As are the lobster, I believe.  Maine is famous for its lobster because they possess a larger quantity of them—Cape Cod lobster are rarer, sweeter, more expensive, and more succulent.  Scallop boats out of New Bedford bring in more money than the famous king crab boats in Alaska.

Clam closeup

Then there are the clams.  New England clambakes are legendary, even among those who have never been here.  The clambake is a traditional method for preparing seafood, using steamed seaweed and heated rocks buried under the ground.  In many places around the Cape, bars and restaurants advertise “authentic” clambakes.  But the one we attend, and that I blogged about way back when, in one of my earliest posts, actually *is* authentic.  It’s held at the VFW, and has been the same for decades.  The same, except now attendance is dwindling, with only 150 left of the 500 who used to attend annually.  Sadly, of the benches that were filled up when we attended eight years ago, only half were full this year.  They said they didn’t even break even this year, as membership in the VFW dwindles.

He ate four quarts--and flashes me a four to prove it

I understand, because it still feels like a steal to me.  $32 for all-you-can-eat steamed clams, haddock, sausage, corn, potatoes, butter, brown bread, and onions.  All of it steamed in beds of seaweed, dug into holes in the ground by veterans and volunteers.  There were so few people this year that we were able to fill up huge bags full of clams and corn to take back home with us.  Later, we transformed them into clam scampi.

A volunteer rakes the seaweed--still the same seaweed, the same rocks

It’s sad to me.  The VFW, and social organizations like it—clubs, churches, leagues—are the institutions that hold America together, that keep us strong.  When I was in college a book came out called “Bowling Alone.”  It told of the collapse in American community organizations from the fifties and sixties till today.  Back then, people joined bowling leagues, or the AmVets, or local social clubs.  Now we bowl alone.  We live, as we dream, said Conrad—alone.

Now people sit on their asses and watch television.  Play computer games.  Mess with the internet on their smart phones.  We shop at big-box stores.  We don’t go wade for quahogs or check lobster traps.  We don’t dig kelp and rocks to prepare food on a beach.  We buy bargain chicken grown in factory farms, chickens that can’t walk, that never see the light of day.  I’m one of them—don’t get me wrong.  Maybe we’ve gained something—freedom, Wikipedia—but we’ve lost a lot too.

Not that the seafood’s necessarily any better than farmed meat.  Grillabongquixotic doesn’t eat seafood for ethical reasons, after seeing firsthand the way the ocean’s been fished out.  These new fishing shows (Wicked Tuna, Dangerous Catch) glorify the fishermen out there, but ignore the quantities being taken and the dwindling fishery.  Scientists estimate that human beings have already reduced the population of big fish in the ocean to 10 percent of what it was in 1950.  We’ve eaten 90 percent of the fish that we had.  Already in Massachusetts, bay scallops, the sweetest of the shellfish, are gone.  This used to be the only place in the world where you could eat them.  Now there is not enough sea grass to support their reproductive cycle.  How many years till there aren’t any clams?

Some people eat meat and don’t eat fish—better to eat factory-farmed meat than fish out our remaining wild food.  But then some people don’t eat beef for ethical reasons.  Cattle emit methane (methane could provide electricity for us, I argue, but no one listens) and are grown on factory farms.  Chickens and eggs and hogs are problematic, too, with the vast pools of toxic waste their production manufactures.

In Thailand, I met a traveler from Peru.  He didn’t eat soybeans or any soy product.  He refused to.  He’d seen the forest in Peru being clearcut for soybean fields.  It was the first time I’d seen someone who ate meat, but not tofu, for ethical reasons.

So in August we ate our clams, bottom feeders, and we’ll keep eating them until they’re gone, I suppose—until the New England coast is remade by aquaculture.  Aquaculture and algae are among the few things that can save us from climate change, I believe.  Offshore wind and algae farms, with oysters and shellfish beneath the surf for protein.  Delicious, nutritious, and good for the planet.

Plus there’s all that butter.

August is a good month to spend in Massachusetts.  But now it’s September, and already it’s getting colder, the trees tinged with red.  Now it’s September, and as House Stark like to remind us, winter is coming.  Winter is coming, and with it the cold.

Beach Retreat Day 7

Women carrying bamboo

On my second day here, a woman and her two daughters approached me on my porch for water.  I gave them most of what I had, a full liter.  Then they asked for tobacco, or the betel-nut-tobacco combination that most people chew here, giving them mouths like blood.  I didn’t have any, of course, but at that moment the delivery man showed up with my lunch:  two boxes of food, a coke, and a cooler full of coconut water.  I felt so guilty, like I had done something wrong, just with my plenty.  He gave her a banana-leaf-wrapped chunk to chew, and they walked on, unable to communicate.

As the week has progressed, my solitude has begun to feel less so.  I am not alone.  This beach is for people who work, who fish, who carry water-logged bamboo logs cushioned on their heads, who gather shellfish and hermit crabs at low tide.  One day, as I lounged, watching the sunset, I saw a man hunting something along the water:  he would spy something and then tiptoe, high-legged, towards it, like a parody of someone hunting.  He dug into the hole he found with a stick, and if he found what he was hunting, he’d pull it out and throw it against the sand, hard, with surprising violence.  Then beat it to death with his stick, then coil it—a sea slug or sea snake?—with others in a plastic bottle.

Others walk among the garbage, collecting glass.

This culture is one of hunter-gatherers, people living on the verge.  Two dogs adopted me, primarily because I give them fish scraps.  I don’t think anyone else feeds them.  They have bony ribcages, lean frames.  They spend most of their day sniffing around for snacks amid the refuse.  When I don’t have bones to give them, at night they whine quietly in the sand.  I think they’re hungry.

Beach dogs

And here I am, amid this scrounging society, a writer.  My purpose begins to obscure.  What good am I, Bob Dylan asks, if I say foolish things?  Anything I sang, he says, you can say it just as good.

Today, my last afternoon, I found a bench along the ocean and lay alone with my iPod, listening to Ray Bradbury, an audiobook I brought along.  When I sat up I was surrounded by women in longyis, one of them the old woman from that first day.  I noticed now that she is also missing an eye.  Her socket sagged empty, the skin closed around it.  She asked for tobacco, I think.  I didn’t have any.  She asked, from what I understand, if I was alone—bringing her two fingers together and then separate.  I motioned to my heart, to my bungalow, saying:  just me.

I don’t feel the envy of my alleged wealth here, not nearly as much as in Laos, or even in Thailand.  Instead I feel pity from Burmese people.  I may be rich in material goods—but I suffer from a poverty of companionship.  The woman nudged my ridgerest, feeling its cushion, grazed my bag with her fingers, then went to work, knocking barnacles off the bamboo logs she had stacked nearby.  She seemed to be the forewoman, and hacked notches into the bamboo, so other women could drag them down to the surf, could carry them on their cushioned heads.  All of them had lean, hungry, chiseled muscles, supermodel physiques.  For what reason they carry the logs I don’t know.  It seemed arcane to me, mysterious.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I pulled out my sketchbook and drew.  I thought of ripping out my drawing and giving it to her, but what good would that do?  Would she even understand?  And besides, I was selfish of the pages in my sketchbook, the book I’ve carried for four months and only used for the first time today.  I was selfish of my own drawing.

Beach drawing

She could see what I was doing, but I can’t imagine what she thought.  Did she think:  stupid fat farang thinks that’s work?  Or did she think, as I did:  she’s doing her work, and I’m doing mine?

Some days I can think of it like that.  On good days, when I can think of what I do as a kind of calling, when I can face the truth inside that cheesy cliche.

Another book I read this week, an ebook, was Dodie Bellamy’s the buddhist.  A quote:  “The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion.  I don’t know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling.”

My kingdom for that kind of confidence.

I came here for solitude, for writing, and all week my solitude felt invaded, compromised, by well-meaning solicitous Burmese people.  My friend from Dawei showed up with three companions and took me out for coconut and crab.  Various people invited me for rides on their motorcycles, invited me to share meals with their families.  I refused them all,  attempting graciousness.  Other than garbage-pickers, I haven’t seen anyone else alone.

People here don’t seem to understand being alone—my loneliness confuses them.  Is it just that I’m American?  Have I fully absorbed rugged individualism as an ideal?  The one part of Asian culture I could never get behind is communalism.  While I applaud the idea in principle, I could never live the way Thai people do, multiple generations crowded beneath one roof, everyone up in everyone else’s business.  In Thailand, people have children just so they have a place to live when they get old.  They plan their children’s births based on astrology, so their golden years will be comfortably padded.  I don’t think I can live with my parents, or with any fictional children, long-term.  Even living with one person  I love gets to me, most days. Small-town gossip destroys me.  I love my anonymity, and my desire for travel rears its head as soon as I lose my status as a stranger.

As the lone representative of my culture here, what must they think?  That Americans are a lonely breed.

I’ve chosen this loneliness, and still my longing for companionship exists inside me like an ache.  Yet I know:  if any others were here with me I’d be turning towards them for validation, approval, comfort.  What does he think?  What does she want me to do?

I’ve written about artist dates before, the prescription given my Julia Cameron in Artist’s Way:  two hours, alone, each week, to do whatever the hell you want.  Truly alone.  No children, not even a dog.  Just yourself to please.

My favorite artist date in Chattanooga was the independent film series at the movie theater downtown.  I loved everything about it:  driving downtown along the curving highway in my Miata with the top down, parking in the garage, the adrenaline rush of walking down the concrete stairs alone, each time remembering that horrific rape scene in the Sopranos—and then sitting all by myself, in the darkened theater.  Even there I got strange looks, the occasional come-on.  Who’s that strange girl here all alone in the middle of the day?  But I adored it, the silence, the popcorn all for me, and the response to the movie utterly my own.  Even now, the movies I saw then are among my favorites.

Once I convinced my friend Ellen to come along.  I really wanted her to; I practically begged.  I thought it could only make it better.  And though I loved seeing the movie with her, sharing it with her, it changed the experience completely.  Instead of being fully enveloped in my own response, I was thinking about her.  Did she like that line?  Did she get that joke?  What did she think?

Being alone sharpens my attention to my own desire.  But it also makes me feel shame.  Spending a week alone at the beach, just like going to a movie alone, feels utterly profligate.  What good can it possibly do?

Another side of communalism:  the shame it engenders.  I hide in my room when I see Burmese people outside because I’m ashamed of my bathing costume.  I had to walk down the beach, out of view of prying eyes, to lay prone in the sun (something I was brave enough to do only twice).  My favorite part of watching the movie alone was that it was in the dark—no one could see my profligate selfishness.

I’m an alien in a strange land.  I still don’t know why I keep putting myself in these situations where I am completely alien.  I like to think it’s because I’m more comfortable inside when the alienness of my exterior matches the alienness of my interior.  I’m more comfortable when everyone else can see that I don’t belong.  In the States, when I do things wrong because I don’t belong, no one understands.  Here I have an excuse.  I am unique by definition.

Still, uniqueness breeds isolation.  Isolation breeds loneliness.  And I am lonely.  This is what I’ve wanted for so long.  Meals delivered me.  Complete freedom to make my own choices.  And yet…

The truth is that I still don’t know how to balance being alone with being around other people, how to balance others’ needs with my own.  I don’t know how to do that, and it makes me sad, because I need other people in my life, but as soon as I let them in they consume me.

Tonight, a giant cricket lands on my mosquito net.  Other crickets croon outside.  The surf rolls, unceasing, to my right.  I have leftovers in styrofoam boxes for dinner, leftovers I’m afraid to eat on my porch because I have to hide them from the dogs.  Tomorrow, back to civilization.

En route from Marion, Massachusetts, to New Haven, Connecticut

Et in Arcadia, ego

156 miles, 12.5 hours
 

This morning I slept through my alarm, set for six AM, and had to run to catch a bus leaving from New Bedford, supposed to allow me to transit in Providence to get into New Haven before noon. But the company failed to mention that I was supposed to change buses, to Greyhound, at a random transportation plaza in downtown Providence, rather than going to the bus terminal.  Now it already is after four and I'm stranded in Hartford, eight hours into what will probably be a fourteen-hour journey. It was supposed to be three.

I'm going to Connecticut to pick up a car belonging to my family, a car that I intend to drive back to Marion and then to Chattanooga, hopefully tomorrow, and thence to Atlanta, where the flight to Bangkok departs on New Year's Eve. But today's snafu has me questioning all sorts of things. Namely: what the heck am I doing planning for six months of constant travel when I can't even manage one lousy bus transition, in my own backyard, when I speak the language and can read the signs? How am I going to survive in Burma? Or Cambodia? Or anywhere?

It makes me want to buy the next bus ticket to the County and hole up for the winter. I find myself wondering what I'd be doing there. As I write here, in blue pen on paper, it's barely light in Hartford, so the County is already dark. I'd be back from my solitary walk, like the one on which I took the picture above, having seen the light glowing above the washout. Maybe I'd do yoga, think about dinner, make a pot of chai. I'd be putting more wood in the woodstove, petting my cat, listening to NPR. I'd be cozy in my office, with a blanket around my knees, working.

Instead I sit huddled in my down coat on a bench at an old train station, drinking fountain soda to stay awake, pretending to listen to my iPod to avoid contact with strangers. I've already burned through all my reading material and am debating buying more. They have a newsstand at least. And I see months of this kind of life laid out before me, months of sleeping in train stations, of existential angst, of constant fear that I'm on the wrong bus, train, platform.

I said to myself, during my first three-hour bus station wait of the day, that this day had a nightmarish quality to it, and then I stopped, because this is exactly my recurring nightmare: I'm in a bus or train station, or in an airport. I have to be somewhere by a certain time, or the time is already past, or I'm already too late, or I'm supposed to be elsewhere. My itinerary keeps changing, and I have to be shuttled across town in bad traffic. My plane's already left, or it's going to leave, or I'm going to miss it, and then, generally—I lose my suitcase or wallet or passport or ticket. Then I wake up.

But here I am, putting myself in a position to experience exactly that same sequence of events again and again and again, for months. Why? Because it's what I want, or claim to want. This is what I wanted. This is what I've always loved.

It's exactly the part of travel I've always loved—the fear, the missed connections, the life balanced on a knife's edge. Travel, especially in a foreign country and an unknown language, is a constant state of existential crisis. One never knows anything for certain. One swims in a morass of uncertainty, with a delicious frisson of danger running beneath its surface. Uncertainty becomes the water in which one swims, the water which one breathes. It's what I love, or what I'm addicted to, what I crave, what I long for. And the payoff is so great! The relief, when arriving at a long-sought destination, is a crescendoing climax, an utter release of pent-up adrenaline and anxiety.

The human heart is a mysterious place. Human desire utterly unpredictable. Even my own is a mystery to me. Once I heard Amy Frykholm read from her book See Me Naked, an excerpt about a girl so anorexic she'd become unable to identify her own desire for food. She couldn't recognize her hunger as hunger, so couldn't identify what she hungered for. My best friend's husband is a doctor who works with obese diabetics, trying to help them change eating patterns, and he says that many of them have never even had the experience of being hungry. They don't even know how it feels.

I am certain this trip is something I am hungry for, something I've hungered after for a long time. “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart,” says the psalmist. More and more I think desire is a road map for life, a signpost pointing each path forward. The more I live closer to the bones of my own desire, not from fear of what anyone else thinks, or what others want from me, or for me, not according to cultural dictates, but closer to what I want from my own life—the closer I am to fine.

What I want, what I've always wanted, is to travel. Despite it's inherent labyrinthine torture. I am certain of that. Maybe not forever, but for now. And that certainty limns the waiting, lights the way forward.

Bridgewater, Maine

September 29 -- 2009

Leaving the farm is going to be harder than I at first thought, I must admit. I also must admit that I've been grieving for much of the last month, maybe still grieving even for the objects I lost at sea—not exactly the objects but the ideas. The leather notebook with five years of story seeds. The dream journal with four months of dreams.

I know I must regard these things as ephemera, as things that are lost, and I feel I should be strong enough by now to let the things go. To let all things go. As I must let this place go if we really decide to adventure again. But I am dragging my feet.

The longer I farm, or whatever it is we're trying to do here, the more I realize that it's simply an act of heroic emotional resilience. I understand why farmers don't want their kids to be farmers. Because there's tragedy in it, and death, and I simply can't bring myself to eat or harvest the food in the garden as I write, knowing that I'm leaving it, that I'm leaving this land. I simply don't have the emotional strength for it.

Which maybe is okay. Maybe all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Maybe it's okay that I just ate four leaves of kale with my rice tonight. We've learned, also, that the boat needs its wooden mast replaced, so whatever departure may not be as imminent as I'd hoped. And of course as soon as I learned that I was desperate to leave this place—leave this earth, these roots—always wanting what I cannot have.

Deer Isle, Maine

Town of Stonington

The idea behind an Open Studio Residency is that the studios of all different disciplines are open to artists of various disciplines, to visit, explore, ask questions, and perhaps experiment with others' materials. And almost all of the studios here are of disciplines I've never explored: wood, metal, jewelry, pottery, glass, paper. I am drawn most to the paper and book artists, which makes sense. So yesterday I made paper for the first time, from shared flax, small discs of paper on which I hope to type.

After that, I don't know. Maybe I will sew them in a circular binding. Maybe I'll frame them in leather and hang them as a haikumobile. Maybe I'll convince an assistant to teach me to weld. Maybe I'll have the 3D printer build me a three-dimensional story. Maybe I'll carve in clay so I can tile a bathroom with words.

Certainly, ideas are not lacking after spending even three days together with people such as these. The most freeing thing about this openness is the way it makes any idea viable. This place is nothing if not fertile loam for creative growth. Stu Kestenbaum, a poet and the director here for twenty years, talks about the creative process seriously, in a way that makes clear the decades of hands-on experience he's had making it happen, watching it happen. There's a depth behind his words that makes me as serious about it as he is. He's spent his life watching artists grow, cultivating them the way others would plants.

Always, my subconscious rewards creative play. It's almost as if we have to distract ourselves for image and imagination to germinate. The question I continue to return to is: how do I know what I want? How does that part of myself decide? The diversity of craft represented here is mind-blowing—artifacts that I could not have conceived. But still somehow all of these people have the same level of certainty about their craft, and not just about their craft but each specialization within it, materials within each specialization, each shape, each color, each microscopic decision.

Maybe choice is the central player in art, even when the number of choices is infinite. Maybe we like talking about that less—the numinous subconscious goop guiding all of these decisions—because whatever part of us choosing is a mystery. And still, somehow, a part of us knows.

Lay me back down

“I hate blogs. I even hate the name. Blog, blog, blog. Awful word.”

“I rather like it. It recalls snog, the British word for kissing a stranger. A nice echo.”

Embarrassed laughter by assembled audience.

“Also there's the sense where it's a web log. I keep my blog because I began at a time when I kept a boat log.”

“According to the Writer's Digest, you're suppose to have one if you want to publish. But you're supposed to write about something other than what you want to publish!”

“Can't you think of each post as an essai, in the French sense? An attempt? A brief questioning into the nature of a subject? A petite picaresque? Montaigne wrote essays about asses farting.”

“Awful. No. All of that electronic stuff. I've never read a blog I liked.”

“Maybe they're the best books being written, ones that read beautifully as complete oeuvres. Bumfuzzle, I recommend. This guy, trying to sail in a canoe to South America, after building his boat himself in Mexico. Then there's this couple, living in a 21-foot Sea Pearl in Argentina.  The Secret Life of a Former Prostitute. The Out of Eden Walk. Scarlett Lion.  And Tavi, a gift from the spirit of the age, thank God. But each blog is like ether. They drift off and disappear, to be mined, in the future, but cultural archaeologists.”

“What about the comments? You have to deal with the things people say!”

“And they do say awful things. Someone once told me to burn in hell. Some else told me I'd be better off dumping my loser boyfriend. It was not cool. But now, mainly, I take every comment as a precious gift.”

Even you could comment, for instance, if you wanted, and I'd love it.

Can't see over to the other side

The Psychedelicates and their wine-soaked songs

Last night I went to see my friend Carol's show in Presque Isle, at Bou's, a club aptly named. It made me feel, as usual, on most days when I wander around Aroostook County, that I don't belong. Spending time with Carol, who belongs so thoroughly, who builds community as art practice, as much as I love her and love spending time with her and at her home in Castle Hill, makes the feeling especially acute. All of the county girls were out last night, in kitten heels and shorts, all of the twenty-somethings, one of which I once was.

Now I'm not. Now I'm watching my blown-out garden, praying I get tomatoes indoors, and maybe a pepper or two before frost, bolting cilantro and lettuce, basil I can't bear to cut back. I feel always like the odd man out, the one that doesn't know the score, the thin man in Bob Dylan's ballad. Here I am, the one thing that I want—belonging--the one thing I can't have.

It makes a better story that way. K.'s been looking at boats and boat blogs again. Here are two:

Downeast Cutter

Ingrid 38

I'm not allowed to post links whereby you might go find these fine sailboats and buy them yourself.

And then, what follows soon after sailboat searches?  Adventurer blogs.  This guy, Grillabong Quixotic, flew to Mexico with nothing but a dream, to build an outrigger sailboat. Now he's in Panama.

These people raised a child on their engineless Ingrid. Who needs an engine?

As soon as I'm happy, comfortable, putting down roots, I begin to make plans to pull them up again. Kayak searches to Baja. Lonely Planet guides. Emotional separation from the dog that'll never survive Mexico.

Casting off, you say? Casting off indeed. Sometimes I believe that the best thing to do would be to stay put, that again I'm just running away from belonging, from stability, from home. Sometimes I don't want to run aymore.

I want to paint walls. I want to plant rosebushes. I want to put up bookshelves and brackets for hanging plants and window boxes. But what's the point of buying paint or bolts or lumber for someone else's house? Better save that money for epoxy and teak-and-holly ply and bosun's chairs.

I want to reach out

Today is drear, gray, and overcast, the poplars just beginning to be touched by green along Snow Road. The rain is making the loggers take the day off, which means blessed silence, except for the U2 I blare at my desk. Make hay while the sun shines, they say, another adage that has real meaning now that I live on a farm. I should have planted my beets and broccoli this weekend, when I had sun, even if it was Sunday, my Sabbath.

We have a single lettuce that over-wintered in the cold frame, from which I have already eaten several delicate leaves. It's a lettuce I thought was speckled romaine, last year, but which now looks closer to a spotted trout-back, according to Johnny Seed, and which becomes far too bitter to eat by June. So we did get vegetables in May, despite our spring vacation. It's the time of year when there's too much to do, in every area—dirt to be tilled and enriched and sown, new beds to put in, new crops to try—and I don't always feel like doing any of it.

It's days like this one that I'm happy farming is merely my avocation. I'm trying to be more focused, more driven, even more disciplined, dare I use that loathsome word. I loath that word, but it's one people keep chirping at me, as if it's the solution to life, the universe, and everything. Often I believe that's the opposite of being true, that discipline is dust in the mouth, and the true answer is joy, joy in all things.

Life is a daily practice of mindfulness, of coming to my desk, coming to the blank page, coming to the earth, coming to the mat. I know it, and as Bob Dylan says, still I'm learning it these days. How do I become strong? By a daily delight of being in a single place, of being present in time as time moves forward.

The rainbow is the answer

I've been distant the last couple of days, going through the exhausting whirlwind of meetings and travel to finally end up here, where I get a blessed week of peace and rest with family, time to regroup and recuperate. This event was definitely the bravest thing I've done alone in a while, and while it was vastly rewarding, I'm realizing that the reason I want a career locked alone in a castle turret at a desk is because I'm so self-conscious in the presence of strangers. It can almost become crippling, the insecurity I feel about my appearance, my body, my clothing. No more so than in a strange city, as I was this last week.

I remember days in Chicago when I'd wear a pair of ambitious shoes, how I'd become convinced that everyone on the el was staring at me, as conscious of my wardrobe as I was. But I wanted to wear the ambitious shoes. I wanted to be the cute girl in leopard-print stilettos that all the guys were making eyes at. It's a simultaneous desire to be brave in appearance, to dress in such a way that everyone notices, and then a desperate fear of that same desire, a desperate fear of standing out.

Does everyone feel that insecurity, or is it just me? I notice how much easier men have it, in their comfortable generic loafers, matching their identical suits. They don't have to worry about those decisions. Or maybe they do--maybe I'm selling them short. Then again, maybe it is something completely different for women. Who knows. Teiresias, the only one with experience, said he'd choose to be a woman. So maybe it doesn't matter.

Does it come from being made fun of as a child? Being a dork in middle school and high school? Does it come from switching climates in college, having no clue as to how one dresses for winter, either over-dressing in massive ski jackets bought at Bangkok import sales, or under-dressing, in thin Chinese-print thrift-store shirts, on dreary early rainy gray days in fall, when everyone else had figured out it was time to wear a coat? Or does it just come from being one of these people who's always been more comfortable in the world of ideas, the world of words, and still has absolutely no idea how to move a body through space?

Well I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith

Winter snowshoe scene

Sorry for the depression, guys. This afternoon I'm again thinking about grand plans for the spring--digging up the pond and using the moss in my flower garden, where I will plant bulbs and flowering shrubs, and turning the gravel pit at the back of the land into a swimming hole. That's a spring fed beaver pond out my office window, y'all.

Or maybe I'll build a sauna, out of all the cedar, and then I'll heat it up to 200 degrees--as hot as I can take without cooking my innards--and heat myself so I can go out and roll around naked in the ice, even in the heart of January Jones.

It's February, but I still think of it like that, thanks to an unforgettable Conan sketch on late-night television. Go YouTube it, oh ye in the land of internet. [We get Conan for free on Canadian television--Canada, where you get basic cable analog!] Now I have anthropomorphized the entity of winter into a hard-partying, chain-wearing African-American gentleman who does guest spots on Mad Men. When I feel glum, I ascribe it to him.

I spent the morning punching away at the keys of my grandmother's typewriter, a Hermes Rocket. K. repaired the ribbon, the ribbon that lived on Secret with us for two years, and now I have an operational typewriter that allows my brain to function in a different way than with computer keys. Slower somehow. More careful, but also more muscular. If anyone knows where I can get one of those big rolls of paper like Jack Kerouac used, send me the link.

It’s bloodied and broke

Autumn begins

Another in my ongoing series of little book posts. I don’t know why I keep going back to the little books I kept on the boat for source material. Or I do. The time I lived aboard was a dream come true, a dream that some days I wish I hadn’t woken up from. And then I find a note like this one:

more space

Each word underlined individually, as if a prayer. There are things that I miss about the boat, and there are thing I don’t—the daily olfactory onslaught of an onboard septic system is one. I kept lists and lists of designers and names, boats I longed for, and what they all had in common was more space.

Space I now have in spades. I have acres of space. I look out the horizon at Canada, at the single white pine that sticks above the tree line. I go for mile-long walks and have miles to spare.

Is it true that we always want what we cannot have? I stood at the bottom of my lawn the other day, chasing the last ray of sun as the line of shadow crept across the grass. I looked up, over the beaver pond, at my neighbor’s bus, on top of the hill, blessed by a full hour more of sun. If I were to start my own religion, a la Ron Hubbard, it would be a Ra the Sun God revival.

Then I remembered the last of the ten commandments: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, or wife, or animals, or manservant, or maidservant, or prime piece of real estate. No wonder God said that. How easy is it to cast my eyes up the hill, to covet the fruit from his apple trees, to not appreciate the jewel that rests in my own hand.

Then I came home, and K. said: Just wait till winter, and the wind’s howling at the top of that hill.

So. On the boat I wanted vast openness, and now I crave heat, and motion, and international travel. Maybe that’s why I write here, to explore the choice between those two lives. This blog began as a record of my travel by sail, and it continues as a record of my search for stability.

I wrote one of those six-word Hemingway autobiographical short-shorts, once upon a time. It reads:

A traveler learns to stay still.

Marion, Massachusetts

Hunkering down today because of the alleged hurricane caused me to think about electricity. The storm itself died before it reached New England, as I suspected all long during the last week of mass panic, but after the wind arrived it was still strong enough to knock down countless trees and the power for the entire day. In some ways, it was the best day of my mini-vacation: I played pool, darts, and the piano, read back issues of magazines and the newspaper, ate food I had forgotten about and would otherwise go bad, and engaged in candlelit conversations on the deck while maples surrounding the house dipped and swayed.

The other source of entertainment was the police scanner. In between reports of yet another branch fallen on power lines, there were stories about domestic disturbances, children abandoned to swim in the storm surge, drunk women swaying through the parking lot of the local package store, and flooded causeways. As if everyone went crazy without electronic devices and televisions to keep their hunger at bay. Even the doctor and his wife across the street, outdoor enthusiasts and runners, broke out their giant battery-powered halogen lamp, as if light alone could keep away boredom.

It made me think about even a hundred years ago, when people had to do things like play games, make music, draw pictures, and write letters to keep themselves amused. How things have changed. A day without electricity made me realize that it’s the central source of civilized change, the civilization that I’m not always sure is a good thing. The times in my life when I’ve been happiest are those when I didn’t have electricity. When I lived in a tarp and spent my evenings gazing into campfires, or when I lived on a boat and burned hurricane lamps while I played cards.

I don’t want to minimize the benefits of the electronic age. I couldn’t be writing these words without electricity and its accoutrements. Yesterday I took a field trip to the Boston Museum of Science, where they have the world’s largest Van de Graaff generator, a device that generates lightning indoors. It was awe-inspiring and loud and made me feel like a kid again as I plugged my ears. But it was also shocking (ha!) to see how powerful are the forces that run our lives. To envision the fluid stream of electrons animating our wires, our walls, and our fingers.

As dusk fell tonight, we broke out candles, Shabbas votives made in the Dominican Republic. Maybe I’m not ready to give up my electricity, but a furlough from it every now and again seems a good thing. Sometimes my furlough lasts months or years, on a trail or a boat. Sometimes just a day. Maybe those of the Jewish faith are correct in taking that Sabbath every week. If I were brave enough, maybe I would too.

Everything is free

Sunset over potato fields

Another job on my list of ideas from the Bahamas was Emerald Bay, a resort in Exuma. I had several resorts on my job list, mainly in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, places where a bilingual American may have been able to slip her foot in the door. It’s funny to imagine now the alternate life I could be living—as a receptionist at a posh hotel, bumming around with fellow expats at night, rowing home by dinghy to my home in the cluttered harbor. It sounds so sexy, and yet I know I wouldn’t trade the life I have now for that one.

No matter where I am, working for some big corporation, even one in an exotic beachfront locale, makes me miserable. I’ve known that for years, since about when I started working. What makes me happy is living for myself, working for myself, being completely dependent on my own whims and wits and laziness for survival. I sit at a desk most of the day here, in Aroostook County, but it’s my own desk and my own choice.

When I was working in a cubicle, on some days, bad days, I could actually feel each useless second slip by, as if each one tinkled as it passed, dropping into the glass hourglass of my life. I could feel my body spreading wide, dying beneath me. I was getting paid for each of those seconds, a pretty hefty wage at that, when I think about how much I earn now, but it didn’t matter. I was a whore—I was selling each moment of my time, when time is all I have.

So. I could get a big job with a corporation here. Big telemarketing firms have outposts in Maine. There are hunting lodges and convention centers here, the Maine equivalent of resorts, not to mention doctors’ offices and restaurants. Or I could continue to carve out a hardscrabble life for myself on my own—seeing what I can grown and can and preserve, picking up odd jobs here and there—maybe cutting Christmas trees again this year or harvesting potatoes this fall, maybe making wreathes out of northern Maine red crap (my favorite unidentified plant up here), catching an occasional communication consulting job on the internet. Because the less I have, the less I need.

Here’s a song for today, from Gillian Welch:

Everything is free now
That’s what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay

I can get a tip jar
Gas up the car
Try to make a little change
Down at the bar
I can get a straight job
I done it before
Never mind you’re working hard
It’s who I’m working for

Every day I wake up
Humming a song
But I don’t need to run around
I just stay home
Sing a little love song
My love and myself
If there’s something that you want to hear
You can sing it yourself

Because everything is free now
That’s what I said
No one’s gotta listen to
The words in my head
Someone hit the big score
I figured it out
And we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay