Splendid Isolation

(Lucas Foglia)

In addition to this, we were supposed to be planting and maintaining a garden that would sustain us through the winter in soil that had been left to its own wild devices throughout millennia, and making steady progress on the construction of our house, which we hoped to complete by summer's end.

IN THE MORNINGS, WE TENDED THE GARDEN IN THE BEATING SUN, tilling and planting and weeding, my mother, the overseer of our disgruntled teen and preteen chain gang. As we worked, we were devoured by mosquitoes, thanks in no small part to the fact that my mother, that summer, was at the height of her natural woman thrall: We could not use DEET, or any other such brain-destroying, earth-polluting, future-progeny-harming chemical. We would slather our bodies instead with pennyroyal or peppermint oil; we were instructed to swallow cloves of garlic whole. Stories abound of early explorers being driven back to where they came from by the mosquitoes of northern Minnesota, and I have absolutely no doubt that they are dead true. In the evenings, we would make a game of counting the bites on our bodies by candlelight. The numbers would be along the lines of 79, 86, 103.

And there were also the wood ticks and black flies, each of which came in great waves, unlike the mosquitoes, whose population remained steady and abundant all summer long. In June, we picked so many wood ticks from our bodies and from the animals that we filled a gallon jug with gasoline and kept it close at hand so we could toss them in and kill them without a more time-consuming rigmarole, the gasoline growing denser by the day. In July the black flies came, their bites so vicious you couldn't keep from yelling out in pain. We had to hand over an entire week to saving our horses from them by making a wide ring of fires in the pasture, which we stood near through the heat of the day, repeatedly smothering the flames with fresh grass that we'd raked up with our hands, in order to create thick plumes of white smoke, our horses standing gratefully in the middle of them, in a black-fly-free cloud.

In the afternoons, when we weren't making smoke fires, we worked in the shade of the woods, on a knoll set back from the road where my mother and stepfather had decided to build the house. It was this work that I undertook with something resembling zeal, unlike the time I spent toiling in the garden. I didn't care about eating tomatoes or green beans. I wanted my room. I could see it already, though the ground upon which the house would be built was still nothing but weeds and bushes and small trees.

We made the driveway first, clearing the way with scythes and saws, then spreading the gravel. The gravel came from a pit up the road, just a few miles past our place. Monday through Friday, approximately once an hour throughout the day, a gravel truck would rumble past our shack to collect or deliver a load. Often it was the only vehicle that would pass for hours, and the growl of its engine and the thunder of its wheels on the road became something like a comfort to me. The truck was driven alternately by one of two men, a father or a son. The father was paunchy and reserved, waving impassively to us with the flick of a hand if he saw us near the road. The son was a tan, taut god, about 20 years old. He was practically the only person under the age of 26 and over the age of 10 whom we'd seen for close to a month. My sister and I fell in love with him instantly, from afar. The sight of his bare, exquisite torso behind the wheel of that truck as it passed us at 18 mph was enough to make us fall to pieces, so when it came time for him to pull into our nascent driveway and dump load after load after load of gravel as we stood nearby, shovels in hand, my sister and I were in hysterics. When he climbed out of the truck, shirtless as he always was, to collect a check from our mother, we were so overcome we had to dash with humiliation and ecstasy into the woods.

WE SPENT JULY PREPARING A DOZEN OR SO POLES to serve as the frame of the house -- scraping them clean of bark with hand-held tools and then coating them again and again with a wood preservative. In the evenings we ate the first vegetables harvested from our garden, and I felt begrudging pride that I'd had a hand in growing them, that it wasn't only my mother and stepfather who were self-sufficient. Together my parents could do, make, grow, sew, fix, rig, invent, bake and build pretty much anything. During the week, our mother did five times the work that my siblings and I did combined, and on weekends, my stepfather was a torrent of productivity. When the two of them were working together, my siblings and I knew well enough to simply get out of the way. We played cards in the cool of the shack, or, outside, we placed a saddle on the hitching post and practiced mounting it cowboy style, in one leap -- the horses too shrewd to allow us to practice this move on them.

In the high heat of the day, our parents would take a break, and we'd all go to the spring-fed pond five miles away that was called the Swimming Hole, as if that were its proper name. We went there four or five times a week to load up an endless line of five-gallon buckets with water for the garden and animals and also to bathe. Aside from town, it was the place we were most likely to encounter other people. There were essentially three groups of them in our corner of the county, each defined by the era in which they'd arrived: newcomers like us, with a back-to-the-land hippy bent; Finnish old-timers and their offspring, whose families had come to homestead the land in the early years of the 20th century; and the Ojibwe Indians, who'd been there first, most of whom now lived on the reservation 14 miles northwest of our place, and who kept to themselves. In a convenient convergence of liberated hippy values and the Finnish nude sauna tradition, hardly anyone wore their clothes when at the swimming hole, whether newcomer or old-timer. The hippies lounged, bronze and hairy, nursing their toddlers on towels on the grassy bank, alongside old Finnish men who disrobed with indifferent grace and glided like geese into the water. Sickened, I shamed my family into keeping our clothes on, insisting that we reach inside our bathing suits instead, shielded beneath the privacy of the water, to scrub with whatever lump of soap my mother had deemed to be the most natural.

Refreshed and cool, we'd drive home slowly so the buckets we'd filled with water wouldn't spill, and return to our homestead to work into the evening, our days growing longer as the summer passed and our bodies adjusted to the labor. In August, we sunk the poles we'd prepared into holes we'd dug and filled them with cement, bracing them plumb until they set. Around the poles, we built the floors and walls and the stairway that would lead up a flight to our front door.

As the house slowly moved from concept to reality, I saw that it wasn't going to be the middle-class dwelling of my dreams, but something decidedly more functional and funky. Something that wasn't even, strictly, a house. In the rush for shelter by autumn, not to mention our construction budget of next to nothing, my parents had opted to build one structure that would serve all of our needs: The bottom floor would accommodate my stepfather's shop and a hay barn and stalls for the horses, and our living area would be up above, reached by an exterior stairway. The square footage of each of the horse's stalls -- which were directly below what would become our living room -- exceeded the square footage of each of the "rooms" that would belong to my brother and sister and me -- rooms, as it turned out, that were really one big open loft separated by closets that doubled as half-walls between us.

Still, as the leaves fell from the trees and I turned 14, it was with enthusiasm that I drove the nails into what would become the floor of my so-called room. It was well into September, and a half-room with only one honest wall was good enough for me. School had begun, and each morning my brother and sister and I woke in the shack and boarded the bus that took us to McGregor. Caught entirely in the grips of teenage conformity, I was grateful that we were among the first to be picked up for the hour and a half ride to school, so few of our peers saw where we lived. I didn't even consider telling my new friends about the particulars of my home life -- that I washed my hair in a big pot heated up over the woodstove or that my family had begun using one of our five-gallon buckets as a toilet instead of making the trip in the cold to the outhouse. Shamed by my family's unconventional ways, I concealed them at every turn. And also I concealed myself, the girl who knew what it was like to live a summer on the fruits of her own labor, becoming instead, at least at school, the girl I'd been eager, all that summer, to be -- synthetic and fabricated, thin and afraid.

It wasn't until Halloween night that we moved into our house. And even then it wasn't so much a house as the beginnings of one. Standing inside it, you could see outside through the gaps and missing knots in the salvaged boards that composed the walls. It would be months before those gaps were filled and the rooms roughly finished, years before the house could be called anything but rustic. Water and electricity came first, thankfully bound to each other by the simple virtue that the pump in our well was electric and it wouldn't work unless we joined the grid. We got a phone late in my sophomore year of high school and last, a flush toilet, well after I'd grown up and moved out.

But none of that mattered to me on that first evening in our new house. We rumbled through it, joyous and relieved, the ghosts of the work we'd done all around us. My mother cooked a pot of potato soup and a rhubarb cobbler on our Coleman stove propped on a piece of plywood in our new kitchen without appliances. We ate it while sitting around our old table that had been in storage for months. It was cold and dark and windy outside, precisely as Halloween should be, but no trick-or-treaters came to our door, and neither did my siblings and I go out to trick-or-treat. It was the first Halloween I went as no one. I just sat with my family eating soup and cobbler, posing as myself.

. . .

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the novel Torch, and her work has twice appeared in Best American Essays. She lives in Portland, Ore. She can be reached cstrayed@earthlink.net.