Seeking the Simple Life

      Having found myself getting a new lens for my right eye, and possibly not seeing the light of day, I have decided to submit another brief episode from the book I am trying to write called The Red Queen and the Feral Child Within.

     I’ve always attempted to explore the idea of pursuing a simple, almost feral, life away from the constantly striving of Lewis Carroll’s “Red Queen”. It seemed a better life to avoid accumulating more and more stuff of modern society. This is one of those struggles experienced in upstate New York.

Here I am working on my feral look—when I was much younger.

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     Still enamored by the quietness, and the intrigue of living close to the land that we had enjoyed in the Trinity Alps of California, we selected a farm house south and east of town. Here, we intended to make a stand for the winter and maybe our years while teaching in the local high school. The old farm house was still intact by our standards and did, without a doubt, offer the isolation and ambience of the rural setting of this northern area. It was a farm that had failed some years ago and like many, was being lightly used by neighbors or was doing the slow crawl back to the wild lands of the Iroquois. 

       I and the owners talked back then. Went over the situation as well as they knew it, about the availability of the property to our wandering, about hunting and the cutting of timber for fire wood. They turned it over to us, I suspect, assuming we had enough backwoods savvy to sort the place out—but sure as hell they didn’t. I mean, they were opera singers from New York City and this place was disheveled pile of antiquated farm life.

     The savvy part was probably over estimated in that we were now in an environment we had never embraced before, at least as independent individuals. Yes, Wisconsin was our home state but I was always in the caretake of my family, not a naïve privileged family, but still, I was cared for. Ann was more privileged and citified but the last couple of years had expanded her vision—maybe deluded it. She had cried on the entry of our first very meager home in Hyampom California. Here she thought we had the “savvy” to pull it off or maybe blind faith in my skills which had been honed back in California or rural Wisconsin.

     With axe in hand and rifle on the wall, we settled in as the fall turned the country side into a lush pallet of colors and a cool damp land of vibrant life. Each day we went off to my job teaching and Ann’s classes at Potsdam University. In the evening we would arrive home to the welcome of our dogs and the quiet life of the farmstead. We would start up a fire in the wood burning cook stove and then, as the fall moved in, the cumbersome furnace in the basement was stoked.

       In parting with the landlords in early September they requested I not blast the prodigious amounts of chipmunks they claimed were in the immediate area of the house. Shooting in general was ok but no chipmunks. It seemed the little buggers lived in the walls of the house and were on occasions very noisy as they scampered around in what was obviously empty walls, meaning walls without insulations. I understood the desire to lay off the “cute” rodents, but missed the implications that there was indeed, no insulation. Never got my attention. Just one of those things that at the age of twenty four went unnoticed. Obviously, there had been folks living here for well over a hundred years and they survived so what is the deal with insulation?

      We progressed with our new lives in the land of beautiful autumns, winding country roads damp with fall rain and covered with colored maple leaves. It was a time of country comfort, a simple way of young lovers left alone with few struggles, no bills, two loving dogs who traveled by the name of Brown and Blue. You betcha, we were almost visibly feral and away from that Red Queen?

      As the first frosts nicked the morning grass, Ann took the dogs along to school to have them sit out the day in the car rather than in a now-cooling house. On return in the evening, we noticed the dog’s bowl of food, the one that had been left full on leaving, was void of all its contents. Now we were having a financial issue by inadvertently feeding wildlife. Giving up good food for chipmunks was clearly not to my liking, and what the hell were they doing ‘in’ the house?

      It was time to go to war with the little bastards. They were not just in the empty walls but were sharing our living space and most likely comfortable in some nest right behind the kitchen stove. The next night three new hefty traps were placed out in the kitchen even though we knew chippers were diurnal and not nocturnal. Interestingly, we did hear them at night as well so they were obviously well fed and sporting the entire time content in their set up. In the morning, there by the stove was a sprung trap with a very diseased rodent, not a chipmunk but a very large Norwegian rat. The other traps were sprung, empty, tipped off by the untimely death of their cousin. Needless to say, the rural experience was taking a new turn.  After a brief ratty funeral, and the continued failure of the trap line, not to mention the creeping frost entering the old house, we were forced to reconsider being feral at that moment.