Kindred Spirits

by Tony Whedon 

Out my study window, the cat on the picnic table pretends to sleep. Three feet above her head the morning’s chickadees flit amongst the rose hips, keeping a watch on the cat who stretches and licks her fur, pleased with herself. She rarely catches and kills a bird, but rather snoozes, at her advanced age, almost all the time. Her life is lived in a series of anti-climaxes punctuated by lazy observations of her small world. A smart cat. (I wish I could say the same for me!) It’s thirty years since my wife and I began the business of taking notice of the significant inconsequential things, and we’re still green at it. On our walk this morning I ran into flock of summering Canada geese on a beaver pond. If I were one of those Hudson River School painters, I’d wait for something more dramatic, say a storm threatening to blow up by afternoon or heat lightening turning the pond a mystical blue. Maybe a filament of evening light beneath black clouds, heifers in a nearby field casting their gaze toward a home.

But I am not a painter.

The white cat lies on its side. The chickadees prattle and say, please free me of my resentments.

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Heroism is the topic of the day, prompted by looking through a book of nineteenth century landscape painting and stimulated by the thought that it took more than accuracy to capture the grand vistas of the Catskills and Adirondacks that fill this book. (The cat motionless in the sun, the chickadees gone wherever they go at noon). It required both talent and dumb faith in Nature for the Hudson River School painters to transform things. But intention – does it always accompany deep perception? And does one need to intend anything to be heroic?

Our neighbor boys were certainly heroic in how they saw things. I first met Frank and Jerry during the snowiest portion of winter in this part of Vermont. Nothing distracted them from the snow falling past the pines, down through the hollow to our house, not school or video games or television – and not other kids. The boys watched the snow fall through the clearing into the woods, and when the storm let up they followed the tracks of a fisher cat down the valley to the river. They’d never seen the animal that carried off two of their chickens, but found the remains of the gutted carcasses a few yards from the henhouse. Across the road into the hayfield they went. Smart, the way children growing up in the woods are smart, yet fated to develop a fear of strangers. Frank, the feisty, compact one, and Jerry, the taller, ganglier and friendlier one, followed a near-invisible scree of disturbed snow along the river. 

Ten years after our first encounter, Frank, the younger brother, fatally shot himself in the driver’s seat of a stolen car out in Kansas, and Jerry, afflicted by a terminal kidney disease, retired to his home place. Outside of a short stint in the Alaska fisheries, he’s  spent all his adult life in the same home-built shack buried in these mountains where he and his brother grew up.          

It’s a dismally beautiful place. 

A stone path from his cabin leads down to Dreamer’s Brook. Tall conifers shade out all but the brightest sun from its smudged windows. Jerry lives just up the hill from our house. I pass him on the road sometimes when he’s headed to town. He’s not the kind to linger and chat, but when he does he’s always pleasant.

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Established in the sixties by a group of young political activists, Jerry’s home was once a stop-off for Vietnam draft resisters on their way to Canada. When his family first arrived The Dreamers Commune was already in its dotage: the last of the Dreamers had decamped to West Virginia, and soon puckerbush and jewelweed grew up around the original buildings. The roof to the main house leaked, its rickety steps were rotting away. The boys’ step dad was a Weatherman from California, his mother a potter here in Vermont from Pennsylvania. The van they drove had been assembled from junk yard parts. They made their own toilet paper (out of moss), their own soap (from lye and ashes). Their house was built in the winter of 1969 by The Dreamers from salvaged barn boards and slab wood; the windows were lifted from an old school house, the roof painted with pine tar, its walls insulated with moss.

Over the years Jerry and Frank’s parents kept fixing up the house, but not fast enough to arrest the rot. They fertilized their garden with cow and chicken shit and planted seeds they’d harvested the year before. They shot and ate critters that ate their garden and trout from the brook and chickens that didn’t lay eggs anymore. They ate wild asparagus and fiddleheads and the first nettles and milkweed after they’d finished off the root cellar beets and rutabagas. The kids made their own toys or salvaged them from the town dump, and when they weren’t lugging water from the creek to their house or hauling firewood, they built tree forts and went into the woods to snare rabbits. They explored the ruins of ancient farmsteads, picked blackberries in July and August that their mother canned in their summer kitchen. On hot summer nights, they lay in their blankets out under the stars and woke with the dew on them.

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There are more cases of minds running to leafy rot in wild solitude than those enlightened by it. Nature’s material richness is addictive. The deeper you dive into it, the deeper you want to go. The notion of the Noble Savage grew out of early accounts of “wild Indians” living in the forests of the New World. This Natural Man gave credence to a belief in Man’s innate goodness and perfectability that before the eighteenth century had been a dim hypothesis, but with Rousseau, began to shape our ideas about how children grow up. Most of us agree that Rousseau’s Natural Man was an oversimplification. The forests he inhabited were pristine, but the folks living there were no more natural or less “civilized” than you or me. We see him in his full American regalia, this New Man, this Natural Man, in the deep woods of the Catskills depicted by the Hudson River School painters, an insignificant spectator, taking a broad view of Nature. With their swooping diagonals and pyrotechnical lighting, the unsavoriness of frontier life has been airbrushed from these paintings; everywhere symbolic objects celebrate apotheosis and salvation through nature. 

What if those painters had it wrong? What if Nature tells us nothing and its lessons are lies?

While many of the Hudson River guys studied the art of the European landscapists, the beauty of their work came from their being neither completely American nor European. They never mastered the techniques of color and perspective modeled for them by their sophisticated European contemporaries, but maintained an American freshness, a breathtaking inclusiveness, in their work. Eventually all that would be civilized out of them. And that’s the pattern of all of us who come to Nature: first there’s the astonishment, then we gather up the pieces and sort through all the raw stuff until we come up with a pond with water lilies, a garden filled with yellow irises, or a meadow in winter, completely white, with two boys walking in it.

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While our neighbor boys argued constantly, they weren’t violent with each other. They kept diaries, recorded the first snow. They wrote down how many eggs a chicken laid on a particular day, recorded the date a calf was born, and read books about the history of aviation. They had a library card and took out books on the American Indian, tales of the Canadian North and stories of the first New England settlers. In the evenings, their step dad smoked pot in a hookah, their mother darned socks and knit sweaters, and they went to bed early and talked about how they never wanted to leave the woods.

Then a longing for what most kids long for intruded, and what happens to children brought up alone in the woods happened to Frank and Jerry. Their gestures got jerky, automatonlike; their voices were loud and uninflected. Things they had felt about nature, they began to understand in a conscious way. They scared their few playmates with their willfulness. What was theirs was theirs, what was yours might as well have been theirs, and the world, as far as they were concerned, could go to hell. They hated dogs. They had a pet rooster. They moved silently, sometimes spying on my wife and me from the edge of the woods, wild kids, living by what they knew of the rest of the world.

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Recently I read an article in the New York Times reporting that a painting by Hudson River School artist Asher Durand that hangs in the Brooklyn Public Library is to be put up for auction.  Kindred Spirits, painted in 1849, shows the artist and his painter friend Thomas Cole standing on a promontory in the Catskills. A waterfall plummets into a distant gorge; in the foreground a broken tree stump, what Cole called a “momento mori,” reminds us that life is temporary. Above the waterfall, in a V formed by the mountains, a hawk rises on a thermal. While the two friends are dwarfed by surrounding wilderness, they draw us into the painting to complement a right-triangle formed by the tree, the waterfall, a soaring bird – the crossroads of life and death ruled over by the aspiring imagination. The contrasts in Kindred Spirits between brush strokes and figuration, color and line energize the painting. Without these contrasts, despite Durand’s grand theme, the scene depicted would seem drearily ordinary. And without the two painter friends poised over a Catskills glen, there’d be no mental frame through which to interpret Durand’s allegory – just raw nature.

In Kindred Spirits, Durand and Thomas Cole are dressed more appropriately for a night at the opera than for a walk in the woods.  The two painters have come to this Catskill “clove” expecting a theatrical performance, which is what they get in the painting’s stage curtain texture of foregrounding foliage and the stage-center placement of two “kindred spirits.” To the right, three stone abutments form theater boxes; and in the foreground a pair of birches drape the scene. Despite Durand’s uplifting theme, melancholy fills his canvas. We see it in the soaring bird, the dead tree, in the contrasts of the darkness of the valley and the dusky blue of the sky—and in the painter-friends suspended over the abyss of time.

Keats associated melancholy in his Ode with drowsiness – “For shade to shade will come too drowsily/ and drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.” And there is a narcotic drowsiness in Kindred Spirits. Melancholy, twin sister of nostalgia, has always been considered conducive to inspiration. But, by itself, it’s an adjective without a noun, a longing without an object to long for. It’s not an emotion, but what underlies emotions.

For three-centuries Melancholia rose up from the New England hollows and shaped great spiritual movements (Puritanism, Mormonism, Transcendentalism, Alcoholics Anonymous) that eventually, like Keats, delivered their message of “Joy. . . and aching Pleasure nigh” to the world. For folks who didn’t get hooked on religion, melancholy remained an affliction. Literary curmudgeons were stained by it, political mavericks made rebellious by it. There’s something downright Teutonic about Melancholia. The Vikings were reputed to suffer from it (their cure was to go out marauding).  

And our neighbor boys on Dreamers Road were driven crazy by it. In his mid-teens Frank made friends with trouble-making kids in our town, and he began a brief career in grand larceny. His anger distinguished him from his brother: anger against mother and father, against society (the parents had rebelled against it, too) and against the natural world. He was a good-looking boy with a face a little too delicate, set against an inner hardness. What eventually defined him was the burden of his relationship with his older brother, the quieter one, the less violent one. A burden that was eventually too much to bear.

I can’t say why Frank became a thief.  His was an overnight transformation from wild child to enfant terrible. He had no interest in drugs, and he had no attachments—no best friend, no girlfriend. After he first left and went out into the world, he returned to the woods briefly, then broke into a convenience store in a nearby town, and, caught in the act by the proprietor, who leveled a revolver at him, he took off in a stolen car for an end-of-life marathon drive to Kansas where he was stopped by a police roadblock and shot and killed himself.

A few years later, Jerry and his mother took off again for Alaska. He built a cabin outside Fairbanks for his mother and himself and cursed the cold and other survivalists who’d migrated north. Back from Alaska two years later, he moved into the shack, a hundred yards down the brook from the house he’d grown up in. 

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On my walks, I sometimes wander up to the old Dreamers buildings. They’re fallen down now. The chicken coop roof is caved in, the big house is a hazard of loose timbers and broken windows, the summer kitchen, once a screened-in gazebo, is a nesting place for yellow jackets. There’s still the old garden plot, the kids’ tree-fort and in a patch of wild blooming lupine, a gutted VW Camper with comfrey leafing through its windows.

While most hermits go into solitude out of choice, kids like Jerry and Frank are born to it. And when they emerge from the forest they either crack or grow a skin so thick nothing gets through. They are more than kindred spirits. Not only have they told each other everything to tell, they share the same memories, the same nervous system. But they’re not really doubles – but polar extremes.

To be fair to Frank, he’s done well these past couple of years, despite his kidney disease. He’s a talented musician (he taught himself bass and drums, and plays in a local rock band). But we’re not real hermits any more, none of us. While we’re drawn to people (but won’t admit it) a fear of opening up and pouring out everything makes us suspicious of ourselves and others.

There’s also the fear of breaking the silence of the woods, of betraying the rending beauty of it.

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The woods are never altogether quiet. Nor is a good painting, if one views it from one’s own experience, completely silent. The country music mournfulness of a climax forest alerts me to unexpected ruptures of that silence. But in Durand’s gorgeous painting, not a twig snaps, nary a bird twitters. A mother coon chitting to her little ones, or the exchange of barred owl hoots are absent from Kindred Spirits. Instead, there’s the general without the specific, a libretto without the score. What conversation did Durand and Cole have that afternoon?

Durand’s Catskills meditation is about brothers in art, not blood brothers. They share an appreciation of the dramatic gesture and anticipate a mutual eureka to illuminate the forest. But that anticipation undercuts their finest efforts and makes us ask, Is that all there is? They come to witness nature, to sketch what they see – a sepia-tinted waterfall, a jumble of rocky faults and stone turrets – and are gone.

 

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