Splendid Isolation
A summer stripped of all the things a teenage girl could want turned out to be exactly what she needed

By Cheryl Strayed
Sunday, July 13, 2008

THERE WAS NO MUSIC IN MY HOUSE THE SUMMER I WAS 13, so when I recall that time now, it's strange that a phalanx of songs comes to mind: "Tainted Love" and "Eye of the Tiger," "Abracadabra" and "Don't You Want Me," along with the rest of their snappy compatriots on the pop charts in June and July and August of 1982. Those songs were always playing on the radio in my mother's car when we went to town that summer, a once-or-twice-a-week excursion that was, to me, nothing short of bliss. I was living with my family in a 20-by-20 tar-paper shack without electricity or running water or indoor plumbing or a telephone on 40 acres of land in north-central Minnesota on a gravel road in an unmarked, sparsely populated patch of the county called Beaver Township, 20 miles from the nearest town.

Town, town, the word still claws glamorously at my insides, evokes an eternal shimmer of possibility. In town, there were people and businesses and things to do, even if those things were only playing a round of Ms. Pac-Man or eating a frozen pizza heated up in a bar toaster oven or sitting in the car listening to the radio station from Duluth whose signal reached us just barely once we got to town.

I was paralyzed with the joy of it all, but especially with the joy of the latter. I devoured the synthetic beats and electronic turns and suggestive lyrics, carried those songs with me all that summer. It was the first summer of my teen years and the last of my childhood. I was pre-menarche and pre-high school, pre-boyfriend and pre-starving myself to a stick. I wore my hair long and often tied unironically into two thick braids along the sides of my head. My face was bare of makeup, my hips ample with unself-conscious flesh. But in every superficial note of my mom's car radio in town, I felt myself losing that girl I was and hurling instead toward the girl I yearned to be: someone sultry and sophisticated, cosmopolitan and chic.

A girl whose emergence was, without question, delayed by a summer in the woods living like a pioneer.

"It's ours," my mother had said incredulously again and again the autumn before, after she and my stepfather had purchased the land. They'd paid in cash. Twelve thousand dollars -- the entire amount that my stepfather had recently been awarded in a judgment against his former employer, after he'd broken his back in a fall from a roof nearly two years earlier. It was the most cash either of my parents had ever had or would have. The land, the first significant thing we'd ever owned. We'd been renters always, bouncing from one ramshackle house or shoddy apartment to another in my family's every incarnation -- my mother married to my father, my mother married to no one, my mother married to my stepfather. And now, at last, we had a place that my mother referred to in an exalted voice as home, though I, at 13, bitterly questioned that description.

There was no house. There had never been a house. We would build one ourselves when we moved onto the land the following summer. It was this prospect that compelled me, however grudgingly, to cooperate with my parents' dream of homesteading; that quelled the resentment I felt about being forced to leave the town 30 miles southwest of Minneapolis where I'd lived since I was 6. My adolescent rancor aside, I was excited about the potential of my new life. In our new house I'd been promised, for the first time ever, a room of my own. In it, I would sit and read in peace or write in my diary without anyone lurking nearby to peek over my shoulder. I would listen to music, regardless of radio reception, playing cassette tapes on a stereo that I believed would materialize with the room. In utter privacy, I'd dress for school in alluring, fashionable clothes I didn't own -- things like black leather pants and lacy halter tops and spiky heels -- applying copious makeup before a mirror that was mine alone, in preparation for a day as a ninth-grader at McGregor High, the school I'd begin attending come September. There, I planned to shuck off my old reputation as a sturdy, avid, curious, book-loving girl in favor of one more coolly indifferent and darkly aloof.

IN MY FANTASY MUSINGS, OUR HOUSE WAS CONSTRUCTED ALREADY, but up close the pace was glacial, the progress painfully specific, the task unimaginably big. And before we could even begin to build what we referred to as the real house, we needed to build a place that would shelter us temporarily.

All through that autumn and winter and spring, we spent our weekends in Beaver Township, making the three-hour drive north each Friday night from the town where we lived. Over the course of those weekends, my stepfather and mother built our tar-paper shack out of scrap wood, while my younger brother, older sister and I tamed the area that surrounded it, creating a tiny outpost of civilization in the wilderness. Our 40 acres were a perfect square of trees and bushes and weedy grasses and swampy ponds and bogs clotted with cattails, with nothing to differentiate it from the trees and bushes and grasses and ponds and bogs that surrounded it in every direction. Each side of our property was a quarter-mile. Together, my family walked the perimeter in those first months as landowners, pushing our way through the wilderness on the two sides that didn't border the road, as if to walk it would seal it off from the rest of the world, make it ours. And, slowly, it did. Trees that had once looked like any other to me grew as recognizable as the faces of old friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves beckoning like identifiable hands. Clumps of grass and the edges of the now-familiar bog became landmarks, guides, indecipherable to everyone but us.

In early June, the day after I finished eighth grade, we moved up north for good. Or rather, my mother and my two siblings and I did, along with our two horses, our cats and our dogs, and a box of 10 baby chicks that my mom got for free at the feed store for buying 25 pounds of chicken feed. My stepfather would continue driving up on weekends throughout the summer and then stay up come fall. His back had healed enough that he could finally work again, and his job as a carpenter during the busy season was too lucrative to give up just yet.

The four of us were alone together again, just as we'd been during the six years that my mom had been single, and our days and nights felt familiar in tone, though they were entirely different in content. Waking or sleeping, we were scarcely out of one another's sight. My siblings and I had always squabbled, in the passing, ordinary, vicious way that siblings do -- over who got to sit in the front seat or consume the last handful of chips -- but now our battles grew epic, intensified by unbroken proximity, unbridled by space or time. My sister was 16; my brother 10. Almost always when we fought it was two against one, and I, the middle child, was rarely the odd one out. I would join with my sister against our brother when he annoyed us with his childish ways -- when he fiddled with the dial of the car radio or gauged his dirty fingers into our cherry-scented lip balm -- and with my brother against my sister when she veered into her most insufferable teen-girl moods and ruined our fun.

My sister and I shared a bed on a lofted platform built so close to the ceiling that we could only barely sit up. Our brother slept a few feet away on his own smaller platform, and our mother was in a bed on the floor below, joined by our stepfather on the weekends. Every night we talked one another to sleep, slumber-party style, telling old family stories, alternately laughing or squabbling about the day's events, or complaining bitterly about our new living conditions.

"You'll thank me for this experience someday," my mother always said, when my siblings and I launched into a bitch session about all the things we no longer had, the new discomforts we had no choice but to endure. We'd never lived in an exactly urban environment or in any manner resembling luxury, but we had lived among the comforts of the modern age. There had always been a television in our house, not to mention a flush toilet and a tap where you could get a glass of water. In our new life as pioneers, even meeting the simplest needs often involved a grueling array of tasks, rigorous and full of boondoggle. Our kitchen was a Coleman camp stove, a fire ring, an old-fashioned ice box my stepfather built that depended on actual ice to keep things even mildly cool, a detached sink propped against an outside wall of the shack, and a bucket of water with a lid on it. Each component demanded just slightly less than it gave, needing to be tended and maintained, filled and unfilled, hauled and dumped, pumped and primed and stoked and monitored.

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.