Hello from Scotch Mountain!
We’re still up in the Catskills in that tiny one-room cabin. So far I’ve dropped plywood on a toe, split a fingernail, and turned an ankle in a muddy rut. It could be worse.
We haven’t been here for two years, so the first day—just to find the path to the shack—we had to yank up a bunch of groundcover that we planted to keep the hillside in place, but had taken over everything. We also had to clamber over a chunk of tree that blocked it, too, and when we got set up, sawed the thing in half and drug it away. A little after that, I single-handledly and miraculously restored the banister for the rotting wooden steps that got knocked over by electric company doing god knows what to the line.
And when the tiny water heater cracked, we even figured out a fix which at least allowed us to have cold running water, though it required several trips to the local hardware where the guys were really happy to help me solve my problem, and didn’t seem to mind my short hair and dykeliness. On the last visit, one even told me that I was well on my way to becoming a plumber having learned the first rule—that every problem required at least three trips to the hardware. Har, har. My god. I feel so incredibly butch.
And of course, there’s also been scrubbing, lots of scrubbing. And a trip up on a ladder to clean the roof. Which I did not fall off of, held aloft by my terror of re-entering an extortionate American health system still overburdened with Covid patients.
All this work because Ana’s finally decided to let the cabin go, what with us being in France. She bought it almost four decades ago as a writing retreat, a quiet, private place, where she could dig deep into her plays. And I’ve written here, too, gorging myself on Leaves of Grass, el Cid, the Icelandic Saga, and then versifying away. I have the whole rough draft of an epic poem which I swear I’ll finish soon.
This time, though, it’s strange. I sink further and further into wordlessness. In between tasks I stare out blankly at the damp, dark trunks of leaf-shedding trees, listen to the creek which no longer roars but trickles. I listen, too, to the small fridge buzzes and hums, and the rain which sounds like pebbles on the metal roof. No words present themselves until now, when I plant myself in front of this screen.
I don’t know if my muteness is something ontological, or just withdrawal symptoms from missing the internet and the constant onslaught of blah, blah, blah.
Hi, I’m Kelly and I’m an addict…
We only go online when we go in town, hunkering down in the car in the McDonald’s parking lot or stopping off at the library where one of the librarians gossips at the top of her lungs, and there’s this girl who growls to herself like an orc. Maybe she is one, roleplaying online. But what’s really weird is scanning the shelves and seeing these names I’d forgotten about because being dead they don’t Tweet, and despite being often in the category of reviled white men still have voices more varied than all those different people from all those different places online which, after taking a break, seem to all be saying the same three or four things. Everything flattened out. And their styles either ironic or so earnestly important I want to puke.
I wonder what would happen if I could stay here long enough to get to the bottom of my silence. But I can’t. I’ll be back in civilization soon, and lord knows what’ll happen then. I’ll probably fall off the internet abstention wagon and pelt you with links. And information. And ideas. A whole disgusting gutter full. And yeah, I’ll resume the serial of my little book, too. But I need to remember this. It’s important. The silence and slowness. How eternity and change are the same. That’s what nature tells me. The creek shifting every minute. The trees giving up their leaves.
In the meantime, the cabin makes a cameo in my memoir, Eating Fire…
Ana took me to her tiny cabin in the Catskills where we ripped each other’s clothes off and rolled around on the floor until my skin started stinging from what we discovered were horrible little ants, and proceedings were discontinued for extermination. After night fell and the yellow moon came out, we went for a walk up the dirt road that climbed a rib of Scotch Mountain. And she told me about moving to Havana with her grandmother, only the two of them, right before the end of the revolution in ’58. Afterwards, a young soldier just down from the Sierra Maestra taught all the neighborhood kids how to make Molotov cocktails. Later on, the high school took students on marches, sometimes at night when they could barely see a thing. Girls were suddenly allowed to do everything. Not like in Cienfuegos when she’d fought with her parents who wanted to keep her under lock and key.
She whispered in the shadows, “You’d walk with an arm outstretched to touch the person in front of you. Like this. And the one behind would do the same. No talking.” She pushed me in front of her the length of an arm, and we walked in silence, stumbling over stones in the dark. When I giggled, she shushed me fake sternly and whispered soldiering tips, “If you pause for a rest, never take your boots off because your feet swell and you can’t get them back on.”
“Let’s go back. I’m tired.”
“Just a little further…”
That’s it for this time,
Disgruntledly yours,
K Leigh Cawgscrow