Walden, a ferry, Bon Iver and Star anise celeriac and apple soup
Abundance: 13 November 2024
Henry David Thoreau and Justin Vernon broke my boiler.
I would’ve been 25, on an overnight ferry to France, too skint for a seat never mind a cabin, three Guinness to the good, stretched out on the floor, head on my rucksack, when I first felt the urge for a shack by a lake pulling at my coat.
As the footsteps around me quietened to occasional, the bow cutting through the blackening night, I read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s account of living in a cabin, in the woods, by a lake in Massachusetts in the mid 1800s. For 2 years, 2 months and 2 days he lived alone, writing; his aim ‘to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’.
How delicious that sounds.
Life is good. I feel the small things - unexpected sun, a message saying my cake had consoled a sad someone on the other side of the world, an autumnal red oak leaf propellering slowly to my feet, an excellent coffee while watched by turnstones, my dog momentarily invisible in the leaves, the first four chords of Primitive Painters, etc - acutely, but I can’t shift the feeling that I live parallel to myself; days half distracted by the ping of communication, the tug of commitments. These last two weeks I have - even more than is usual - been day dreaming about living in a remote cabin.
I remember driving along listening to a radio phone in, a middle aged man talking of something he couldn’t shift. The night before he had one of those dreams that you are utterly in, rather than watching from above. Aged 6, kicking his new ball in the garden, pals running about, the joy of sun tightening the skin of bare arms with lemonade to come and ice cream for tea. Everything in the bliss of now, and completely his 6 year old self. He had no sense that he was older, outside, watching himself. He woke from the dream softly, eyes closed, still the younger him; still 6. Everything was light and good. He smiled. Over a minute or so, like the tide filling a rock pool, his childhood dream self was colonised by the incoming tide of his 50-something reality. His legs heavied, his mind busied and the lightness in his chest took on layers of weight; winter blankets of responsibility piled on one at a time. It was - he told the presenter and us listening - the best and worst of dreams. Never had he realised how much he (we?) carry, even in the daily norm of a fairly ordinary life in a country not at war, living in a regular house.
How can we live best attached to the reality of our short time on this planet if we are constantly under the blankets of modern life. I say modern life; Thoreau’s reasons, in his internet-free, population-sparse, noise-reduced existence were driven by a desire to strip away the fluff, ‘to rout all that was not life’. My 25 year old self could not have had fewer responsibilities or draws on his time, but he also had no direction or opportunities, and understood little of what was troubling him.
160 years after Thoreau, 1270 miles and 452 hours walk away, Justin Vernon - discontent, not in the best of health and heartbroken - took to the woods of northern Wisconsin, spending the winter of 2006-7 in a cabin, hunting for his food, chopping wood and living a life largely apart. He wrote songs, creating ribbons of wordless melody that he later populated with lyrics. He released it later that year as an album, under the now well-known name of Bon Iver1, to much acclaim. It’s an album that has lost none of its beauty in the two decades since. I don’t suppose I have an album or a Walden in me, but I do have a deep wondering of what a period of apartness would give me.
The desire for a simple time - even if only temporarily - has taken over a back bedroom in my mind these last months. Perhaps a flown nest makes it more of a possibility, or maybe I need what it would give more than before. The trouble, of course, is that you always take yourself with you.
Anyway, I let Justin and Henry into my mind more than they were before, and entertained the idea of the simple shack, and almost immediately the boiler goes bang, the bathroom (which the builders were renovating) turns out to be a comedy of invisible jigsawing by an incompetent hand; there is no heating, no hot water, 5 rooms uninhabitable, and a threshold crossed for moving out - alas not to a cabin in the woods, but a small holiday rental available at a few hours notice. I’m blaming Justin and Henry.
Holiday rental Star anise celeriac and apple soup
Recipe and more words below