What Makes a Home?
I hunched over the camp stove, waiting for it to heat my morning tea water. Together, the stove flame and the simmering kettle emitted enough warmth that my shoulders began to relax, and my shivering slowed a bit. When steam started to escape from the spout, I plucked a couple of fir needles from yesterday’s tea bag and poured hot water over it, watching mini-clouds form above the cup. Clutching the cup with both gloved hands, I leaned my face close to breathe in the steam. When the cup got too hot, I held it between my knees, shifting it back to my hands again when I began to feel the burn. Once the tea had cooled enough to drink, I put the kettle on my lap, wanting to absorb every bit of its residual warmth.
The olive oil was solid, so I knew the temperature was well below 40 degrees F, but fir twigs bristled with dew— not ice. So it must be 34 degrees or so. I’d managed fine in colder. Still, I looked inside our 25-year-old Toyota wagon, parked beside the kitchen table, wondering about its bedroom potential. I had slept in it from time to time, but it seemed overly cozy for two. For now, the leaking tent would have to do.
Standing by the car, I caught my reflection in its side mirror. Collars of two coats, one tan and one navy, a wool plaid shirt, and a bulky, turtle-neck sweater bunched under my chin, my head pulled down, turtle-like, within them. My brown wool watch hat peeked out beneath a fuzzy white cloche. Wisps of gray hair escaped around the edges, testifying to my reluctance to bare my head to the cold for long enough to brush my hair. Bloodshot eyes surrounded by puffy flesh looked out over a red nose, a lone drop about to slide from its tip.
“I look like a homeless person . . . Funny thing!” I snorted.
It was now late November. David and I had been camping by the pond most of the past year and a half, but had never really considered ourselves homeless. Until seventeen months ago we had owned a home, although we rented it out. And for several years before that we at least had a dilapidated trailer to sleep and cook in when the weather was bad. But with time the trailer disintegrated, sections sinking into the ground and exposing a nine-inch space that invited wildlife to find refuge. Battles between unidentified creatures and the paranoid occupant cat spewed papers across the floor, overturned containers and knocked spice jars into the sink. Meanwhile, a garden of mold crept across the counters. We would eventually retrieve anything worth salvaging, but for now, we both kept our distance except when we needed to refill the cat’s dish. And I wasn’t interested in ever sleeping there again, even as water rose on the tent floor and my fingers turned numb.
But for all that, we certainly weren’t homeless. “Homeless” referred to people without anything, didn’t it? David and I had land and a garden, and were beginning to build a house with what was left from selling our old one, after we’d paid off our debts.
As I shivered under a fir tree, I stifled a humorless laugh, thinking of the old line about education being the path to success. So how was it that my inter-disciplinary masters degree found me pondering the meaning of homelessness as I neared age seventy-three? But in truth, I’d always known that education came with no guarantees. My father graduated from law school and was admitted to the Montana State Bar in 1929. After the stock market crashed, he wandered Washington and Oregon with itinerant laborers, his hard-earned papers in his pocket as he shook prunes. He fell in love with the lush, green Pacific Northwest, but no law firms there were taking on newly minted attorneys in the midst of a depression. In 1932, in a move that must have been as frightening as it was exciting, he took over the office and library of a retiring lawyer in the little town of Chehalis, Washington. He, with my mother and year-old big sister, rented a tiny house on stilts on Prindle Street, where floods lapped at the foundation each winter. But even in hard times people needed legal advice—and found ways to settle their accounts. For his counseling my father was sometimes paid a jar of honey, or a bag of potatoes, or the hind quarter of a pig.
As Daddy struggled—sometimes anxiously, but usually happily—to develop the career he loved, many whose success was measured in money abandoned hope, family, even life itself. As my sisters and I grew up, Daddy often mentioned the absurdity of working—of spending one’s life —for monetary gain. It had to be for passion.
• • •
And so it was that I left jobs that I lost the passion for, and found great joy living where I felt a part of the changing seasons—the return of hummingbirds, turkey vultures, wood warblers; flowers turning to fruit, green leaves transformed to gold and ruby. But at the moment I was cold. It was all very well to warm the heart and soul with memories, but it didn’t do much for the extremities.
Thawed a bit by the tea and the kettle, I decided to try to move my icy bones. A tiny bird caught my eye, darting from twig to twig in a willow across the nearby pond, gleaning invisible bits of breakfast. The edge of the pond was bare, though a few weeks earlier, squeaks and plops had filled the air as bullfrogs, startled by a visitor’s presence, leaped from their sunning spots back into the water. A fat half-foot in body length, these living gargoyles sat on the bank looking haughty and a bit disgruntled until someone neared, then like age-group breast-strokers at the sound of the starting gun, they sailed through the air and disappeared into the water.
But days both short and cold had sent the frogs to seek sanctuary in the mud until the return of warm weather. I on the other hand, had no winter refuge, mud or otherwise. Then it occurred to me that rather than standing around feeling sorry for myself, I could follow the lead of the active bird and get my blood circulating, a sure way to warm up.
• • •
Hiking up the hill, I came upon mushrooms in a multitude of shapes and colors: orange fairy cups, black elfin saddles, mushrooms with gills and teeth and pores, some with white fringes around the edge, some nearly black and grotesquely contorted, colonies of tiny white mushrooms, big burgundy-colored ones, tan and gold and brown-paper-bag colored, red and plum and even nearly blue. At one spot the ground was littered with bits of tan, white and mauve caps and stems where deer or perhaps elk—some kind of messy, feasting megafauna – contributed leftovers for the mini and micro-crews to clean up. It reminded me of when our son and daughter-in-law expressed wonder that their friend’s baby ate so sloppily while their own young son was meticulous. And then they caught their dog (who was supposed to be in the other room at meal time) eagerly polishing up under the high chair. The memory made me laugh as I thought of the many levels of potential visits to the mushroom crumbs – from rodents to slugs to beetles and microorganisms.
Golf- and tennis-ball sized divots under fir trees showed where creatures – perhaps flying squirrels -- had been digging for truffles, putting to mind one of my favorite examples of Nature’s networking. In fall and winter flying squirrels, along with many other small mammals, smell the strong fragrance of truffles, a major winter food. They dig and eat these small tuber-like fungal fruits and, as they travel through the forest, deposit spores that have moved through their digestive tracts unharmed. The spores germinate, forming underground fungal networks that connect to tree roots, augmenting the roots’ ability to collect water and minerals. And as the trees grow they provide shelter for the squirrels as well as for owls, a major predator of these small mammals.
We’re all intertwined, I thought. The squirrels and fungus, the trees and owls, bugs and slugs, rivers and wind and stars, babies in their high chairs and canine vacuums. What a system!
On the way back down the hill, I came upon myriads of mosses. Mosses like velvet, mosses flat and feather-like, moss that looked like tiny trees, and some a woolly tangle like a poodle’s back. As a child I lay in moss in the woods of Washington, and still remember its thick and springy feel. How many forest creatures must make it their bed, or bring it to line their sleeping quarters? And other beds came to mind: I remembered, on rare and cherished camping trips with my parents, watching them lay blanket-rolls on thick fir-bough mattresses. We slept deeply and awoke refreshed.
What makes a home? A place to sleep? Warmth? Something to care about? Connections? How wonderful that the definition of home need not be confined to the space between walls!
• • •
I knew evening would come early back at the pond kitchen. Those who live outside must tune their schedules to the tilt of the Earth. To get anything out of the garden, I had to be able to see, and at this time of year that would be possible only until about 4:30.
I was amazed to find tomatoes—December was just around the corner, yet they were partly ripe and still solid—and I harvested three different kinds of kale as well. I retrieved a big onion from its current storage place (the back of the car), put on rice and began chopping onion and tomatoes. The beans had been simmering for an hour or two.
David had moved our tent inside the empty shell of the house-to-be—upstairs, in what would eventually be the bedroom. And after washing dishes, he had used the still-warm dish water to thaw the olive oil, wrapping the bottle in a thick bath towel once the oil was liquid. As I began fixing dinner under a lantern’s light, David built a fire in the stone ring behind where the tent used to be.
Blue sky turned peach, fading to opal gray as if distant techies played with the stage lights. Fir trees’ green became black, and a wisp of a waxing moon glimmered beyond the trees. We pulled chairs close to the fire, watching logs glow red, swell, pop, turn darker. We ate relaxed, contented, warmed to the core.
With dinner so early, I decided there would be time to fix something extra. Maybe Patrick would stop by. Patrick, a young friend from Ireland, dropped in occasionally, pulling out his tent when it was warm or sleeping in his car when it was not. He roamed the Pacific Northwest spring to fall, farming or doing odd jobs, helping people out, earning his way. He spent winters in Mexico or India or the Pacific Islands—someplace warm. For Patrick, the world was his home.
I could chop some apples from our tree into the cast iron frying pan, simmer them a bit with cinnamon and honey, and top it all with cake batter. Add a heavy lid, adjust the heat just so, and before you knew it, I’d have an apple upside-down-cake fresh from our two-burner camp stove. If Patrick didn’t come by, maybe the next day I would take the cake to town for the woman who sits with her cardboard sign on the corner of Hilyard and 30th. Or perhaps for the guys who sleep under the rhododendrons by the Episcopal church.
As the fragrance of cinnamon and cooking apples filled the air, Pegasus began to emerge from the now-dark southern sky. And there was Cygnus. Before I was ready for bed, Orion would take his place, hunting as always. Basho said that the journey is home. I have loved the journey. It was good to be home.
Evelyn Searle Hess lives in Eugene.
