You think about its good points and its bad. You think about your grandkids walking in the woods and the things you taught them about animals. You think about the loneliness. You think about the quietness and the solitude. You think about the night when the mountain lion walked down the peak of your roof. The night a bear leaned on your back door. The day a huge rattlesnake crawled up to sun himself, less than three feet from the chair in which you were dozing.
You think about the dangerous drives home and how you had to drive 25 miles on ice to get to your wife when she was stranded. You recall those power outages and the total blackness. You think about warm fires in the fireplace and feeling snug with your woman as the scary North winds blew in the Winter. You remember the huge oak tree that Tropical Storm Katrina snapped like a toothpick and laid it alongside the room where you slept.
You recall, just a bit, the feeling of wonder when a huge ice storm came through and coated the trees with shiny decorations for Christmas. You recall how the quiet made it easy to write novels. The way you could daydream to the point where they became real, the characters and places, and all you had to do was just write them down. Walter, the huge turtle, became a childrens' story after he dug a hole out by the wood pile.
Not so pleasant to remember were days you would be at work and look up at the mountain, knowing that you might not get home. Nights when you hit deer with your car or a guy tried to force you to pull off the road. Wee hour stops to help strangers who had broke down and could have frozen...
Sunsets in the summer were cool from our deck, with a cold beer and good music on the I-Pod, dancing with my man, Mick Jagger and his Honky Tonk Women. (That's the only way I am allowed to dance with women)
All these memories and a thousand more. Then I began to have nightmares about my wife having to live in such a remote place by herself if I were to die suddenly. We moved back to our place in the valley, which is 'in the country' and not really in a sub-division, but there is no place you can hang outside without being under the possible vision of a neighbor. Heck, at the green retreat, I could cut firewood all day long and never see another human being. You get so used to the privacy and so casual that you forget about humans. One day I was using the bathroom outside and looked up to see the meter reader getting out of his truck. The poor guy is probably in therapy as we speak.
The longer I lived in solitude, the less I wanted to be around people. At some point this is a bad thing. One needs to be able to function in society and not dread going out to eat or to the theater. A very wise man once wrote, moderation in all things.
The other evening I walked out onto the porch and looked up at the bulk of the mountain. It was 36 degrees here in the valley and raining. I knew that it was snowing on the mountain. I could see, in my mind's eye, a mountain lion and her three cubs, as they strolled across my back yard, all lined up in single file, at the author's green retreat.
I'm CE Wills.
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