A New Kind of Country Read online

  A Fawcett Crest Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1978 by Dorothy Gilman Butters

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Doubleday & Company, Inc., in 1978.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-12852

  ISBN 9780449216279

  Ebook ISBN 9780593159590

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1A New Kind of Country

  2The Beginning

  3The Village

  4Weather

  5Time

  6The Lobstermen

  7Loneliness

  8People

  9Letting Go

  10Arrivals and Departures/Change

  11Men and Women

  12The Unseen/Speculations

  13Simplifying

  14Reflections

  15The Garden/Summer

  16A New Kind of Country

  Dedication

  Also by Dorothy Gilman

  About the Author

  1

  A New Kind of Country

  The main problem is no more whether there is life after death but whether there is life after birth.

  —PROFESSOR ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI, NOBEL LAUREATE

  This is about living in a fishing village in Nova Scotia, and it’s about living alone, and about being a woman alone. Thoreau remarked in the opening pages of Walden, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anyone else I knew so well,” but this is not about myself, not really. It’s about discovery. We’re collectors, each of us, for all of our lives, collecting years, illusions, attitudes, but above all experience, and to me it seemed very simple: I wanted a different kind of experience.

  I was tired when I made the first hesitant decision: of the war in Vietnam that went on and on with accelerating violence; of inflation, which alarmed me; of being a single woman in the suburbs, which seemed to me a slow death of the spirit; of being always in a hurry and never having enough time for anything. To this was added a quite blatant unease: after raising two sons by myself for ten years, the younger one was soon to go off to college and I would face an unemployed heart.

  Once, when I was very young, there had been a kind of scenario, never quite defined, which had grown out of dreams and hopes and the tender assumptions of the young. I would be a writer. I would go to far places and have adventures. I would build a tiny shack in the woods and raise herbs and bees.

  Very tender assumptions. I wrote stories lovingly that no one believed in, least of all my parents, who felt it kinder to discourage than encourage. The bees and herbs I could read about, and did, in book after book. There was a shack in the woods near the lake to which we traveled each summer; I observed it and coveted it year after year, but it was occupied by an old man who started his wood fires with kerosene and one day burned up both the shack and himself. The distant places I collected carefully on paper, hanging maps on every wall of my bedroom.

  The one item not in my scenario was marriage, which happened along before anything in my life had been put together, and following this I was whisked off to the hinterlands with the pressing need for a caring someone fulfilled, but the need for myself tucked away in the dark recesses of a locked closet. I had been, after all, a fragile person and my dreams had been just that.

  But these constants remained: a writing of stories and books, and the devout feeling that all of us must grow inside or die, that it’s given to us to live, not on a straight line but a line that slants upward, so that at the end, having begun at point A, we may have reached, not Z, but certainly an ascension to I or J. Both of these constants were my undoing and there came a day when, taking two children with me, I left marriage and staggered back to life, very unlived, very frail, very unsure and anxious, to begin life all over again.

  And to spend the next years in growing up, coping with problems and stresses, cheering Little League games and seeing Disney films, traveling both with my children and alone, with an occasional peek into that dark closet in which was housed the small dreaming child that had been myself.

  One of my most prized books when I was that child had been John Cowper Powys’ Philosophy of Solitude, already an old book when I met it at the age of nine or ten in the library. I don’t think I read it through completely, or even understood it, but something in me must have recognized even as a child that we are born alone and we die alone, and that we’d better learn how to handle aloneness, and solitude. The book was like the map of a country I’d caught only glimpses of, but I knew it was a country rich in flora and fauna, as well as tricky ravines and cliffs and—oh, yes—the abysses. I already knew something of those abysses; the therapy I’d had at the breakup of my marriage had pointed up the legacy of frail underpinnings I’d inherited and the longings for security that had drawn me too early to shelter. Insecurities are not cured overnight: I might have dreamed of distant places, and by now have visited a dozen foreign countries, but I’d had anxiety attacks in every one of them. What I suffered from, I knew, was a terror of what Paul Tillich calls Non-Being, the big emptiness, the fear of disappearing literally into the void without people nearby to reassure. But Tillich had written about this in a glorious book called The Courage to Be, and I insisted on “being.” Of mattering—at last—to myself. Without props. Cold turkey.

  And so I chose Nova Scotia, I don’t know why, because I’d never visited it before in my life. But it was another, gentler country, it was accessible to the United States by ferry or plane, and I could buy land on the ocean for a tenth of what was possible in the United States. What my sons and I found on that first visit, two years before I moved there, were ten acres on the water facing a lighthouse, and an elderly house with six small rooms and no bath, all for the price of $10,500.

  Two Septembers later, a week after Jonathan left for college, I moved into that house, which had been half gutted, a bath placed in the pantry, and the six dark rooms turned into two large sun-filled spaces. I had no passport for this new life except a number of books on raising herbs and vegetables organically, a patch of garden that Clarence Amiro had backhoed for me two months earlier, and a longing to convalesce from some nameless disease which, for want of any better definition, could be called civilization or Society.

  2

  The Beginning

  For the sum of $10,500 I had received ten acres “more or less,” as the deed phrased it, of earth, rocks, fern, wild blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, wild primroses, an incredible number of wildflowers, and, down near the beach, cranberries that glowed like red jewels in the fall. These ten acres included a large barn that stood very near to the road, and a 125-year-old house at the end of a long drive. Beyond the house the land began a long gentle slope down toward the beach—but not so gentle when pushing up wheelbarrows filled with seaweed—first through wild mallows, then primroses and wild irises down to a belt of ferns, and thence to the damp mossy bog with its cranberries until—suddenly—one was at the beach.

  Mine was a lovely, wild, and primitive beach, with nothing polite about it. There were boulders—harsh, rugged boulders—on which one could climb and stand. Its floor was cobbled, with small flat rocks the water had worn smooth, and tufts of salt grass growing up between the cobbles. The shore faced
a beach pond, a sheltered body of water which the receding tides left flat and green as a billiard table. But just beyond my property line, off to the left, the beach took an abrupt and spectacular turn and ran out into the harbor in the shape of a long curving finger that formed the opposite shore of my beach pond and supported the lighthouse, which had once been a handsome affair of wood and shingle, with people living in it, but was now a kind of Erector Set structure whose housekeeping chores were divided among a computer and two lightkeepers who lived in matching houses nearby. Beyond the lighthouse lay the harbor, which would be busy with lobster boats in their season, and beyond this the open ocean.

  And so from the one side of the house, looking west, I could see lighthouse, harbor, and ocean. The sun set behind the lighthouse each night, trailing plumes of color across the pond; the beam from the lighthouse flashed regularly across my walls at night, and in fog the foghorn sounded, or bellowed, or moaned, depending on the direction of the wind and clearness of the air.

  From the north windows I looked out upon fields of alder and blueberries, and a solitary railroad track down which, once a day, puffed the little train that brought freight and groceries to the village.

  From the east window I could see the highway, and the houses and lights of my two neighbors, the Nixons and the Crowells, while on the south side lay garden, well, a field, and the matching lighthouse keepers’ cottages on Lighthouse Road.

  A great deal had been included in the purchase price; I had actually taken lien on a small universe. And to this universe, besides books and clothes and furnishings, I brought all my suburban ways of thinking, and made an enthusiastic attack on the particular when it was the general that needed attention. I flailed away at inconsequentials. It was early September when I arrived but I rushed to get ready for the herb garden I would plant in the distant spring. I made trips to the lumberyard in town—a distance of thirty miles each way—and brought home expensive boards, which I cut and nailed to form artistic shapes for planting boxes. It was incredibly obtuse of me. It didn’t occur to me that I need only walk out to the lighthouse, and somewhere along that stretch of Far Beach I would find all the boards I could possibly use, as well as wooden barrels washed up by the storms, and bait boxes and lobster crates with hinged lids, and enough lumber to build a house. Like a horse wearing blinders, I looked and admired but from a distance, without relationship, my concentration fixed upon lists: paint deck, bring up loads of seaweed for garden, buy pegboard, nails, trowels, hang curtains, fill kerosene lamps, locate bales of hay—and each day during those first two months the sun shone radiantly, the temperatures remained balmy, the piles of seaweed in the garden grew thick, and my lists grew longer and more tyrannical.

  Until one day something stirred in me, and walking into the kitchen to cook breakfast I looked out at the harbor and the ocean and at the sun slanting through the windows and I kept walking through the door and out of the house into the eight o’clock fragrance of a soft October morning.

  There is an incredible luminosity to the light in Nova Scotia, a southern Mediterranean quality on a sunny day that astonishes the eye with its unexpectedness. The sun reaches the earth without smog, it glances off rocks and water, turns the sky a vivid blue and the water, reflecting it, is sapphire or cobalt and glitters under the sun until it floods the senses. Forgetting breakfast, I turned into the path leading to the beach, found my shoes drenched with dew, hesitated, half turned to go back and look for boots, and then impatiently stripped off my shoes and continued down the path barefooted. Each mallow leaf I passed held a drop of dew in its hollow center that looked—as the sun set it afire—like a diamond dropped there during the night. The grass was rough as rattan on my feet, and wet. When I reached the shore my feet ached with cold and I climbed up on a rock to warm them before I ventured on the beach.

  It was low tide, and when the tide retreated it had left water and sea life behind it in small hollows and crevices. I found periwinkles clinging to the rocks, minnows in small ponds, empty clam and mussel shells, and long brittle ropes of kelp. There was a thick fragrance of salt in the air, and of rich decaying muck. When I turned to go back, something strange had happened. The sun, not high enough yet in the sky to flood the shore with light, was just illuminating a long row of rocks along the shore. Each rock was densely covered with seaweed, and in this juxtaposition—of soft golden light and long slanted shadow—the rocks looked like human heads wearing outrageous wigs of tangled hair…a dozen heads in a row staring primly out to sea…a line of gossipy ladies nodding in the sun.

  I laughed out loud.

  And standing there laughing on the beach in the morning sun, I felt the rigidities inside of me—the inhibitions and timidities and shoulds and oughts and musts and schedules and routines and tensions—as iron bands that encircle a barrel and hold it together by pressure.

  It was startling; it was frightening; it was revelation.

  I put on my shoes and scurried back up the hill to breakfast.

  But it was a beginning.

  3

  The Village

  A Nova Scotia village is very nearly an enclosure. In passing it may look like only a few houses scattered along the road with a church, a general store, and a post office, but there is an intense, hidden life and a deep sense of community.

  In the village where I lived, which I shall call East Tumbril because that isn’t its name, there were only a few defined professions: the priest, the carpenter, the electrician, the postmaster. Skills were handed on or self-taught, interwoven and cross-sectioned in a neighborly sharing way. The carpenter, for instance, rarely went beyond the village to work; he was taught by his father and is teaching his own helper now, who happens to be his brother, and his brother may remain a carpenter or help another brother who goes lobstering, and so veer off in that direction. This provides a permanent job pool that’s based on family, friendships, and eclectic skills. Clarence, for instance, is one of the kingpins of the community but it would be hard to precisely define his role. He owns earth-moving equipment: a backhoe and trucks. He has a gravel pit, he digs basements, takes rocks out of gardens and occasionally works on the roads for the government, and has been known to supply firewood. He sometimes goes lobstering, too.

  To have a field plowed, one calls Frank, who plows only because he cares about his village: he has a mink farm—2,200 minks at last count—and two cows and a huge garden. He charges so little for plowing that it’s embarrassing: only gas money the last time, and that had to be pressed upon him, “because the earth’s still so damn wet I couldn’t do a good job.” Frank likes to do a good job.

  Running through this tapestry—the most colorful threads—are the lobstermen, who supply drama and temperament for the land-based villagers, and who, when not fishing, do not usually spread their talents: they hunt instead, or race snowmobiles like warriors on holiday. But they provide herring to their neighbors in the fall to be salted away in barrels for the winter, and will arrive at one’s doorstep with a bucket of lobsters as a gift. Their life is hard and they know it.

  The first year I was there, in the next village up the road, seven men were lost at sea. The captain rounded up six men to test out his new fifty-foot secondhand trawler and they sailed out of the harbor with the radio not properly tested yet and were never seen or heard of again. An explosion at sea, the Coast Guard reluctantly concluded months later. But when a lobster pot is being dropped into the sea with the winch running tight and fast it’s been known to take a man to the bottom of the sea with it, or pinch off a finger or an arm if a man isn’t alert. A lobster pot is heavy, and weighted with stones to carry it fast to the bottom, and it’s quick, precision work. Two men go out in each lobster boat, the owner and his helper, called a “nubbin,” and the boats generally go out in pairs, too, so that if the wind comes up and the weather turns foul or an engine breaks down, there’s someone nearby to help. Sometimes they work insid
e the harbor, but more often they travel a long way, perhaps twenty or thirty miles out, where a change in wind can pit them against waves twenty feet high.

  Trawlers are bigger and go farther and stay out longer but they’re herring men. Audrey’s brother-in-law has a trawler, and there were three days during a wild storm when no one could raise him on the ship-to-shore radio until at last someone out on Cape Island heard his faint voice saying his radio batteries were weak but he was okay and heading home. The word was passed along from village to village, radio to radio, until it reached his wife.

  Such a sense of community spills over into the village to become the warp and woof of its life. These are deeply rooted people, and few leave. It has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. Privacy is not a precious commodity and there is very little that anyone doesn’t know about his or her neighbor, whether true or not, and the mores are strict. Not abided by, necessarily, but firm and difficult to circumnavigate. The girls usually marry young, and it’s not uncommon to find a twenty-year-old with four children. A wife with a car of her own, even if it’s an old jalopy, is regarded with some suspicion: she’s considered “independent.” The only jobs available for women are in the fisheries in the summer, where the wages are very low. There are few secrets and many rumors; I’ve had a number of people, male and female, sit across the kitchen table from me and say, “I can tell you this because you’re from outside; there’s nobody I could say this to here, it would be all over the village in an hour….”

  To a person arriving from the “outside,” however, there are some pleasing aspects to this after years spent in cities where one could die in June and nobody notice until Christmas. Not long after moving to East Tumbril, but long enough to have established a pattern of my lights going out at eleven, I went to bed one night at ten-fifteen. Some ten minutes later the telephone rang and it was Vaughn Nixon across the road. Bill had been dreadfully worried, she said, and had begged her to call. Had my lights gone out early because I was sick? Was I all right? Did I need anything?