Side Quest
A short memoir of a walk in the woods
This is essay 3 of 4 for the 1729 Writers Cohort 2. Read our work here and follow us on Twitter.
The following essay is a departure from the typical “tech progressive” essays that I normally write for the 1729 Writer’s Cohort. But we’re halfway through the cohort so decided why not mix it up and try a bit of memoir? It’s not something I do often, and I hope you enjoy it.
Years ago, in my late twenties, I spent a couple seasons living in Northern California tending to high-value medicinal plants (if you know what I mean). One of these seasons I lived in a geodesic dome, deep in the woods with some hometown friends. It was an otherworldly experience being so deeply sequestered away from civilization. We operated off of solar power, and if it ran out, we were in the dark. We chopped wood and heated ourselves with a wood stove, and made huge meals with collard greens and kale cooked in pools of bacon grease. We were all very happy reading, working and talking in our warm dome deep in the snowy woods that Fall.
While sampling some of our goods on a day off, I decided to take a walk through the forest. I passed through the immense pines of Northern California as I climbed up a fire road. I didn’t even consider where it might lead. The fire roads in the back country of Shasta, Humboldt and Trinity counties of Northern California are such an extensive network they surely rival the state highway system for mileage. This road might have snaked hours to the West all the way to the sea for all I knew.
Coming around a tight curve, I found myself standing about ten paces from a woman who was perhaps in her 60s. She was alone, loading firewood into the bed of an old green Mazda pickup truck. In the silence and immensity of the mountains, our meeting felt serendipitous. Being under the spell of the forest, I knew I should investigate. This felt like an interesting and unanticipated side-quest.
I offered to help her load the wood, which she accepted.
In silence we took the rough, wedge-shaped blocks from the pile built by the wood splitter, and tossed them in the truck.
“Well, since you helped me with the wood, can I repay you with some soup?” she asked. To which I happily agreed.
As we slowly made our way down the road in her Mazda she started to explain something to me about her house. It wasn’t finished yet, she said. She’d built it herself, mostly, over the last eight years. For a while she was getting help from a man in town, but that stopped a year or two ago. So, I should just be aware that we’re going to a work in progress, not a finished house.
Images of back-country monstrosities falling apart piece by piece scrolled through my mind. Accidental shrines of disorder. I recoiled at the thought that I’d diverted my walk to go to such a place, far off the main road. But then again, I thought, I would have soup in a shed if invited. Let’s just see what happens.
We pulled up to a circular gravel driveway where the trees had been thinned out to create more light and space. There was a small house with a steep descent in front where a modest view of the mountains streamed through the trees. Here and there between the towering pines sat perfectly ordered stacks of wood, cut at similar lengths. The stacks were wedged neatly between the trees, piled three feet high and about ten feet in width, with little roofs perched above them to keep the rain and snow off. The scene gave the feeling of order, resilience and preparation.
The house was subdued and small, and the roof came rather low to the ground. From the outside, it made little impression on me one way or the other.
Entering, I found myself in a small room with a wooden bench on one side for removing your boots, over which hung a rack full of raincoats. Rain, snow, and mud were constant conditions in the mountains of Northern California. The bench faced a floor-to-ceiling window where the green color of the trees flooded in.
In the main room, the woman walked past a large limestone wood stove occupying the exact center of the space. The smooth white obelisk was constructed of large, exactly cut rectangular blocks. It might have been 3–4' at the base and tapered slightly as it rose up to the ceiling. When the eye rested on it, there was nothing but to acknowledge the craftsmanship.
She explained that the stove had been brought from Finland. It’s the traditional style there and it’s very efficient. The large stones absorb the rising heat and radiate it for hours through the night. She said you can heat the entire house through the night with a single piece of good wood.
Slowly, my eyes began to explore the room. Beautifully built dark wooden bookcases lined the walls from floor to ceiling, even arching across the spaces above the rounded doorways. A black baby grand piano stood near the middle of the room beside the wood stove. In the far corner rested her bed, fully exposed to the main room and the stove’s heat. The mattress was covered by an intricate red tapestry and sat perched on an attractive wooden base that held it at least four feet off the ground. The simple arrangement exuded feelings of comfort, peace and simplicity.
Objects throughout the house, on the walls and on the shelves, looked handmade and intentionally placed so as to suggest their purpose to you. Colors, textures and shapes, all worked in peaceful harmony. I was spellbound. I had spent my entire life in cheap houses, by which I mean typical American middle-class track homes. Copies of copies assembled by indifferent contractors in bulk, designed to maximize space and minimize cost. Not that we’re not lucky to have them. But it was dawning on me that there can be much more to a house than I’d previously thought.
For instance this house. This humble, small, wood-heated dwelling had a spirit, a dimension that set it apart from any house I’d ever been in. The mind and the spirit of the craftsman who built it was somehow concentrated into it and could be felt. Like the warm glow of heat radiating from the Finnish hearth, I could feel the peaceful, orderly attention that had brought each inch of space into being by hand by this woman, day by day for eight years.
We spoke sparingly about our life situations as she heated the soup, but none of those memories have stayed with me. Except that she mentioned that the house was a blend of Norwegian and Japanese styles, chosen because those are the places she spent her career as a woman’s choir director.
When the soup was ready we sat at the table together and discussed piano music. I told her my favorite composer was Eric Satie, particularly with Reinbert De Leeuw playing. She told me I need to listen to Arvo Pärt, and brought out a cassette of Spiegel im Spiegel. She put the tape on the stereo and we listened to it and talked as we ate the simple, nourishing meal. Afterward, she handed me the tape and just asked that I return it to her before I leave the mountain. I thanked her warmly, confident I would return to visit her, and left.
Outside, not quite sure where I was, I charted a course downhill through the forest. I was off trail but confident I’d intercept a road towards home somehow. My head was swimming with the beauty of the world and the wondrous achievements people are capable of. How much aesthetic and artistic wisdom was concentrated in that lone woman and her small hand-made home, hidden high in the mountains? How many others were there like this in the world?
If the house indeed wasn’t finished, I couldn’t see it. More likely, it was just in a state of constant refinement. Being honed ever closer to the essence of her design. Perhaps it was never finished the way a person is never finished.
I felt the cassette in my hand, and my hand in my jacket pocket, as I strolled downhill in long strides cushioned by the thick mat of pine needles on the forest floor, my mind glowing, radiating wonder that would stay with me for hours, like the warmth from her traditional Finnish hearth.
Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he guides cities in re-building their civic infrastructure by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government collaborate to build public projects. He is a passionate Bitcoiner. Follow him on Twitter.
