Full Moon

There’s a full moon sneaking over the white pines on the east end of Farrar Pond, and my red canoe is calling me from its mooring in the reeds. Making my way down through the thin woods in the dark to water’s edge, I make a rough navigational plan that would entail paddling to port, then continuing clockwise within the littoral zone at the perimeter of the pond. Slipping off into the inky waters I feel the gentle rubbing of vegetation and bubbles underneath my feet at the bottom of the canoe. The boat and I glide effortlessly around the entire perimeter of the pond in total silence and a darkness made lighter by a growing moon through the trees and an intense Milky Way swirling above the pond, and reflecting up from it.

People are afraid of the dark, especially outdoors in the wild and at night, but I really didn’t know this until much later in life. Counter to my experience, I’m told the woods are filled with killers and ghosts hiding behind trees or lurking in swamps. But I know better, and the woods are the first place I run when I’m afraid, or overcome, or bored. Not from a sense of safety I might feel here in nature as much as a complete lack of fear of anything going wrong on the cultural side out here among the trees. I’ve been ducking out into the woods alone since I was 5 years old when I lived in a small house on a dead end street in Harwich on the Cape. These days they’d call it a cul de sac, but a big yellow sign at the entrance on Rt. 28 read Dead End, and that’s what it was I suppose. The road was named after a nearby beach and anyone visiting the beach for the first time and coming from the East would take our road by mistake. I guess they’d figure a beach could be at the end of a dead end street named after the very beach they were looking for, but then they’d drive to the end, find no ocean, make a u-turn, then drive back up and sometimes ask me for directions if I was out hanging around in the front yard.

The woods around our little house were thick and low and dotted with little ponds filled with green frogs, and that’s where I spent most of my time. My mother let me roam these woods all by myself and this built in me a certain confidence in nature that’s been with me ever since.

I was never bored there and there were plenty of things to do. If I couldn’t find any animals then there were always plants to discover. Like the lady slipper orchids. I don’t know how I knew they were lady slippers at the time, no one ever came out with me into the woods to tell me anything, but somehow I’d heard it somewhere. Maybe I read it when I was older and filled in the blanks back into my childhood. Pink lady slippers were always beautiful coming up out of the pine needles all by themselves, like me…all alone in the woods.

There were ample logs I could flip looking for salamanders, and the herpetologist in me began to express itself. If I could time the flip of the log just right I might get lucky and see a shiny red-backed salamander trying to slither away. Sometimes I’d collect a can full and bring them home. Add them to the others in my miniature zoo of frogs and turtles. Sometimes the salamanders would bite the tails off their roommates. I suppose they got real hungry in a can with nothing but dirt and pine needles to eat. Everyday it was the same thing. Woods, logs, salamanders, lady slippers, pine needles. And in all those tender years I never once saw another human in the woods, or a single ghost except maybe once.

One late summer day around dark I saw a ghost piling wood into a big heap way out in a low spot in the woods. He was white and all see through, and I hid behind a tree to figure out what it was he was trying to do. He moved quickly through the woods working in a big circle gathering up every twig and branch and building them into some huge pointy stack. I’d hide back behind the tree every time his face turned my way. I didn’t want to see his face. Hiding behind the tree I could hear his feet scraping softly through the pine needles like he was dragging them. Then the noise got louder and I knew he was coming towards where I hid behind a skinny tree. I just froze there. The dragging, scraping noises were soon coming from on the other side of the tree from where I hid and I wanted to run. He was very near me now. But I stayed still. Then I heard the shuffling stop as if he was listening to something. Like he was listening to me.

A big branch that was threaded through my legs started to slowly slide away toward the other side of the tree. It was being pulled. And then the big white hulk started back to his pile throwing his recently collected sticks high up on top. With his back to me I took off running towards my house with the empty salamander can swinging violently at my side.

My brother later helped me understand that my ghost was our neighbor, Mr. Chase, whose property I’d wandered onto, and whose habit it was to organize his woods by piling up downed branches into giant piles. My ghost was only a man, a neighbor, and a good one at that. The reality of this and the repetition of experience of peace in the woods created a comfort and perspective rooted in the knowledge that nothing bad ever happened here.

But I’d have a disturbing and recurring dream while living there at that young age. In this dream, the quiet dead end street at the front of the house would fill with racing cars, driving much too fast for our little street, racing down towards the circle and back up towards the entrance as if searching for something, or someone. I’d crouch below my window and watch with fear at the darting headlamps illuminated across the ceiling of my room. What terrified me was what these light beams represented, the threat each beam would portend. There was a busy world out there filled with other people I wanted nothing to do with. I was shy and full of thought, and I knew there was violence and conflict, and these cars were a terrifying reminder of the connection to all that. In the dream I crouched low so as not to be seen, and I could feel them looking over at my dark window from each passing car, but I never once peeked. I crouched below the windowsill sensing the division between the rush of the menacing human culture out front, and the dark, safe woods in the back. The sound of racing engines and headlights across the ceiling would swell until it was unbearable, sending me running from the house down our little hill into the dark woods in the back. I’d push deeper and farther out there until the sounds of cars and their horrific lights had faded with my dissolving fear. Deep in the woods in the dark at night, I was safe from the cars, and I’d gently wake in my bed.

I think of this dream in the canoe on Farrar Pond, and keep the paddles silent listening for any activity above my own. The moon is full and now reflecting and scattering light to the pond and my canoe, but somehow making the shadows in the woods even darker. There are ample nocturnal stirrings in the woods and the occasional splash of fish breaking the surface and diving down below to the dark watery depths. Then here on this side of Farrar, opposite the cabin, I hear the plaintive and gentle honking of geese somewhere off in the woods or fields just beyond the shadows. It’s not the goose cacophony most people are familiar with during the day; this is a sweet and lonely bedtime chorus, as this is where they’ll roost. These vocalizations under this moon at night are a gentle and intimate communication between geese, and it stirs a loneliness in me.

Coasting quietly back into the slip on the shore, I’m met by the large resident cat who apparently knows exactly where I’d return at pond’s edge in the dark, and to my delight, shows interest in the boat. I drive the nose of the canoe up onto the shore just enough to gently ground the boat, and allow the cat to put two paws onto the side for a view of the insides. She regards the innards briefly as if to judge its seaworthiness. I express a muted surprise as she climbs full aboard, and without the slightest commotion or hesitation, I push the canoe back into the night to give my new passenger a ride. Smoothly and in silence, I circle the large pond once again with the cat, her two paws on the gunwale with her tail twitching and with a lively interest in the things of the night.

The cat becomes a frequent passenger on the boat at night. I’m never really sure where she lay in wait sometimes, but I can’t creep down to the boat in the brush without the immediate presence through the darkness of this big cat asking permission to come aboard. I always oblige.