by Laura Crum
I
spent three months all alone at a Sierra Lake when I was twenty-two years old,
with only my young dog for company. (See my first two posts on this topic here
and here.) For those who wonder what in the world this has to do with my life
with horses, I’m getting to it. Slowly but surely.
So
I’ve touched on the magic I experienced at the lake, and I’ve talked about the
fear, but there was one other notable thing. And that was the pure experience
of being truly alone. Not in the sense of being afraid, which I’ve already
written about. But just in the sense of how different it is to be really alone.
We
commonly don’t think much about this. We talk of being alone when we are merely
without others in our home for awhile. We have neighbors, we go shopping, we
drive down the street. We see other people every day. Almost all of us. We are
never really alone.
At Burgson Lake, I was, for long
periods, truly alone. Alone as in I never saw another human. I often went to
town on Saturday to buy fresh food, but sometimes I did not. I sometimes saw
others when I went hiking, but quite often I saw no one. It wasn’t a heavily
traveled area in any sense. And I kept track. So this is how I know that I once
went for ten days without seeing another person.
Ten days doesn’t sound very long.
But stop and think if you have ever gone even three days without seeing another
human. How about 24 hours? Most people have not. It’s an interesting
experience. There can be fear, which I experienced. There were, for me, many moments
of thrilling beauty, when I stared at the light sparkles on the lake and truly
lost myself in the connectedness of the moment, just as I had envisioned. There
was lots of time to read, and to write in journals. I didn’t bring a timepiece,
but I became very good at reckoning where I was in the day by the sun. And the
days stretched long in a way that could be both delightful and difficult.
Cause here is the part I didn’t
imagine before I went to the lake. You get bored. You miss other people and
regular things like cars and movies and bars and such. This was before the days
of the internet, but now, I suppose, you would miss the internet. I missed my
boyfriend. In short, there were moments where I was lonely. I would have given
anything, at times, for a loved companion.
I had my dog and I had books. All
in all, I did pretty well. I wrote in my journal when I wished I had someone to
talk to, and I read. I stared endlessly at the lake and the mountains and the
birds and lizards and deer and pine trees and tried to understand whatever
message they had for me, just as I had hoped to do. I watched the light die out
of the sky, and the flames of my campfire flicker in the darkness. I watched
the full moon rise over my lake. Everything around the lake became deeply
familiar to me, from the small, swampy forest at the other end (lots of
mosquitoes), to the “granite beach” (a gradual sloping shelf of rock that led
into the lake, where I sunbathed), to the “jumping off rocks” (where I dove
into deep water) to the “dock” (a huge old floating log that I tied up near my
camp, which functioned quite nicely as a pier). I became very good at building fires and prided myself on
not needing even a scrap of paper or such. One match, dry needles and ferns and
twigs, voila!
And sometimes I went to town on Saturday. You have no idea
how much patience you can have with things like traffic and lines and crowds
and such when you spend the rest of your time completely alone. It was fun just
to be in the bustling tourist town. But I was always ready to go back to my
camp after a day of town life. In many ways, which I barely understood at the
time, I truly was soaking in the experience of solitude like a sponge. My
Walden experiment was a success in a way I never could have predicted. It gave
me a pattern for my life.
And now I return to what I said in
the first postscript. I view my future as being shaped by this solitary summer
which changed my life. Its interesting, that summer was the only period of my
life since I was fifteen and first allowed to buy a horse of my own, when I did
not own a horse. I had sold Hobby in May, and I bought Burt in September (see
part one and two of “My Life With Horses). In the intervening three months I
lived at Burgson Lake and learned some things.
Back to the present. I said in part
twelve that I envision my future as being more contemplative, and my life as
becoming perhaps a somewhat solitary and hermitish life. I wrote about these
themes in my twelfth novel, Barnstorming.
The truth is that I see that I have
created a life that is somewhat modeled on my time at the lake. I have a small
cabin on the edge of a round riding ring. The centerpiece is a round vegetable
garden with a round birdbath of clear water in the middle. Symbols for sure.
I can see no other houses from my front porch. If I keep my
gate shut and don’t go out, I can spend days without seeing a human other than
my husband and son. This is it. It’s the perfect form of the life I sought. I
have loved companions, I have solitude, I have that cabin by the symbolic lake.
I have my Walden. My task now is to deepen in my understanding and
connection—the goal I sought that summer. I believe that vision can come to
fruition now.
And so my life with horses is no
longer about anything I especially want to “do” with them. It is more about
sharing my life with them. Because one of the things I was acutely aware of
missing at the lake was horses. I didn’t so much miss riding (though I would
have been happy to ride)—I just missed having horses around. And if I am to be
a hermit in my old age, I want to be a hermit with horses. A happy hermit with
horses.
I have written about my feelings
about wanting to be a hermit recently (see On Being a Hermit), but that post
covers only one half of the equation (the cranky part). Just as I did when I
was twenty-two, I still have a vision of escaping the endless busy-ness of
civilized life and the pressure to do and be something that other people exert.
I want to sit on my porch and watch the light die out of the sky without
feeling that I must go somewhere and/or do something. Just as I did then, I
want to deepen in my connection to the natural world. To be with what is. I
want to live as Thoreau did at Walden Pond.
And I can do that right here. In my
own cozy cabin by the shore of my solitary symbolic lake, which is, actually,
about as remote as Thoreau’s cabin was in real life (he could walk to town for
lunch, and could see the railroad tracks from his front door). I have the loved
companions that I missed at the lake and I have my horses. I feel that my
life’s journey has brought me full circle to the goal that I sought in my
youth. And I am happy with this result.
We don’t know what the future
holds, but if I envision anything, I envision this.
And yes, I hope to keep riding as
long as my horse and I enjoy looking at the world together. Here we are
yesterday on a lovely ride through the redwood forest. As Aarene says (Haiku
Farm, listed on the sidebar), “Life is good.”
