Writing a Book, take two
I think I was afraid to write a book because I had a hard time believing that there was anything out there beyond the ego. The last thing the world needs is another autobiography written by a privileged white guy. Convincing oneself that service isn’t indefinitely held captive by the self is the starting point for such an uncertain endeavor. It was the starting point for the work of giving food away at Brush Brook. We were trying to convince ourselves that service was more nourishing than self-concern. And more delicious. But as I try to write in that direction, the stories that keep coming are older, more raw, and so, so sad. When you are writing about the past, I guess everything is a preamble. There was a line in yesterday’s piece that means a lot to me:
If there wasn’t so much outrageous beauty trapped in the wreckage of modernity it wouldn’t be so exquisitely sad.
The following is a story about my friend Laura Trent. She was one of those beauties who didn’t make it out alive. Laura, it took sitting down to write a book to gain access to these memories again. I miss you terribly, and beautifully. May that your story offer some nourishment in a hungry time. This piece follows on the heels of yesterday’s newsletter, which you can find HERE.
Thank you for reading,
Adam
I might be pushing this phone theme a little bit too far, but the following story comes to mind and so I will tell it here. Before traveling to Germany, I lived and studied organic vegetable production on a university farm in California. This was pre-cell phones, and so I would make calls from an old-fashioned phone booth on the farm there. There were two phone booths to be shared by the thirty farming students who lived there full-time. You can imagine that such a low ratio of phones to humans nudged people in the direction of a certain patterns of interaction. Talking to one’s neighbors was less optional in those days. While there, I made friends with a woman who ran a farm a couple of hours North. Laura was the daughter-in-law of an old friend of my mother’s. That is how we met. But Laura quickly became more than a friend to me. I looked up to her in a way I hadn’t known before. She displayed a capacity to articulate her rage for the way things were and then translate that rage into a purposeful, useful life. She grew organic vegetables and took them to the farmer’s market. Looking back now, I don’t know if I could have imagined myself as a farmer, or as an adult for that matter, if I hadn’t gotten to know Laura. I remember calling her from the phone booth at the farm to make plans to visit her for the weekend. We stayed in regular touch after I moved back to the Northeast, and we even made plans for her to meet me in Germany. We would ride bikes across the border into France together.
Laura killed herself three months before I left for that trip. I had known that she struggled with darkness, but this news, coming as a phone call from my mother who had heard from her friend, Laura’s step-mom, washed over me as a breaking wave of total devastation. Laura was the first person I had met who carried the disability I had yet to diagnose in myself. She carried no capacity to avert her gaze from the horror of the way things are. She tried to figure out how to live accordingly, and it ended up being more than she could bear. I didn’t, and still don’t, cry readily, but I remember soaking the ground with tears that Fall. For several years after Laura died, I would regularly get the sudden and full-body urge to dial her number, as if I were sitting in that phone booth in Santa Cruz, to make a plan to go see her at her farm—the closest thing to home I had yet known.
Laura was the first person I had met who was willing to proceed as if what was happening was really happening.
This is a story that wonders how such people came to be such an endangered breed.
This is a story about longing for home in a civilized time.
I boarded the plane to German with only a small backpack. I was going to roam the countryside. As you have seen, it is only looking back now that I realize how much hunger I also carried with me. I did bring a color photo of Mia’s farm, where I would settle upon my return, to show the farmers with whom I stayed. Mia had suggested it, as a conversation starter. I distinctly remember the German farmers’ response when I showed them the photo. They couldn’t believe how much of the landscape was wooded, or that the nearest paved road was six miles from the farm. In Germany, the countryside bore everywhere the imprint of thousands of years of continuous human settlement—cleared fields, stone walls, small villages and small farms. The wild had been pushed out well beyond the edge of the village for longer than people could remember. In Germany, the countryside bore the scars of the lash of civilization and it felt more like home than anything I had experienced in the woodsy wilds of New England. It is a curious and a confounding thing to realize now, looking back. Boarding the plane to come home, you could almost imagine me as a European immigrant boarding one of those fateful ships. Headed West, toward a world with more remaining wildness than my domesticated imagination could tolerate, no language with which to broker relationship with the wild. The immigrants who survived that crossing seem also to have had little tolerance for the humans who were already here, the ones who could have helped them to learn the speech patterns of the resident nonhumans.
I spent more than a decade farming and baking bread before I first tried asking the woods if they would be willing to help me learn how to be at home.
This is a story that roams the countryside looking for home in a de-animated time.