I am a writer and an editor. It’s what I do for a living. So much of my work involves sitting in a room, alone, for long periods of time.
Perhaps because of that, I think a lot about place, about where one is and how one feels about it. I need to vary my own “place” regularly, which is why I spend some months out of the year in Provincetown (it’s on my mind right now because I’m leaving Manchester on Saturday for a month on the Cape). I also have thought a lot about what it is that those of us who chase solitude are looking for in terms of place. I remember my first visit to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, peering into the reconstruction of Thoreau’s cabin, thinking about writing there.
Last weekend I abandoned solitude and went geocaching with my family and some friends, as we hiked through woods and along a rails-to-trails path to find the cache called Camp Nasty, thus named because of the presence of flies and mosquitoes during the summer. (You’ll note that we visited it in February.) I hadn’t given the “camp” part much thought until we were upon it: a tiny cabin appearing magically around a turn in the trail. Smaller even than the dune shack in which I spent two weeks last year (and that was, believe me, quite small enough), it was nevertheless well equipped: a bed, table and chair, wood stove (with plenty of wood stacked nearby), kerosene lamps, tinned provisions on ramshackle shelves. Oddities everywhere: a receipt from a crematorium, old yellowed cards promoting temperance, a small stack of quite unreadable books, an unconnected bulb hanging overhead as a joke.
I brought the cache logbook in to the table and sat there to write, and felt transported back in time. Everyone was outside, crunching about in the snow, identifying moose tracks; I sat in the shelter of this tiny cabin and wrote about the experience. It was meant for short stays, of course; for hunters and fishing-folk. But there was something of Thoreau here, too, the isolated cabin in the woods, the notebooks neatly stacked, waiting to be filled with words, the yellowing books, the wildlife right over the threshold. Perhaps here, too, one could live deliberately.
Except, of course, for those flies and mosquitoes…!
— Jeannette Cézanne
Posted by: — jcezanne
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