Firsthand: Reports from the Field
(Page 3 of 5)
October/November 2003
By Deanna Kawatski
He suggests a walk to the pond. My memory of the pond is a brown muck hole: The dam had burst. The water wasgone. As we scamper down the hill we pass the wooden bear that Jay carved more than 20 years ago. Standing on the lip of the old dam, Nat and I gawk in confusion: The pond is back! We drink in the reflected view, embraced by tall swamp grass.
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Venturing further east, we see where a beaver has repaired the hole in the dam by filling it with birch and poplar limbs and packing it with a mortar of mud. Nat and I cheer the work of the beaver.
We wander to the old garden site. Where once orderly rows of vegetables prospered and fed a family of four, a northern jungle now grows. In its midst we find devil's club, stinging nettle, and the valor of rhubarb, its ruddy stalks still holding strong under the siege of elderberry. A few feet away, a colony of saffron-colored day lilies proclaim their allegiance to the past, when masses of their kind bloomed in multihued glory. Near Natty Creek, which snakes the length of the clearing, we find frail asparagus ferns in the grasp of fecund wild growth. As we fight our way to the most westerly part of the garden, the mosquitoes swell in numbers. Here, a healthy patch of comfrey still sprawls in the grass among cow parsnips. I am touched to see that nature has allowed a few remnants of our past life to remain.
Joe leaves in the evening, and knowing that we have only five days here, Natalia and I decide to ignore our watch es and descend back into sacred time, the endless cycle of seasons and nature, unfazed by man's time machines.
The next day is overcast. Every nook and cranny of the house is filthy. Nat scampers around like a squirrel, sweeping, scrubbing and straightening. I yank the plastic storm window from above the sink, and loathing dirty windowsills, I scrub this one where I used to set fresh raspberry and huckleberry pies to cool. Perpetually seized by scenes from the past, I see a tiny Nat in quilted overalls and a bright sweater dancing down the giant cottonwood-crowded trail, and 2-year-old Ben, in royal blue velour, high-stepping it across the pine-plank floor.
We take a break from cleaning and amble to the creek with buckets to fetch water that no longer flows into the house. We harvest rhubarb from the garden and set it on the wood stove to stew; the house soon fills with a nostalgic aroma. Nat and I laugh a lot and tears also fall for what was lost, for how things might have been. No matter what, we were lucky to have experienced a life about which most people only dream. We achieved a substantial degree of self-sufficiency in a peaceful and wild setting, unencumbered by civilization.
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