Shedder and Shorts

It was difficult for me to appreciate on first reading Louise Dickinson Rich’s book “We Took to the Woods” (Down East Books, Camden, Maine, 1942,1970).  First published in 1942, “We Took to the Woods” is a memoir of Rich’s experiences living along the Rapid Rive in the remote, northwestern corner of Maine. It was a New York Times bestseller for a very long time and is a staple of New England-themed collections. When I first read it at 19, I had hoped Rich would have something misanthropic to say; I wanted a condemnation of society.

We Took to the Woods

That was a silly thing to hope for. I recently reread “We Took to the Woods” and came to the same conclusion Katherien Woods did when she called it “priceless,” “irresistably spontaneous,” “perspicacious,” and “hilariously funny,” in the New York Times. Throughout “We Took to the Woods,” Mrs. Rich offers a forthright explanation of the joys and hardships of living remotely, but does so with a sensitive selfawareness that never places her at odds with the folk lurking in the towns downriver.

“We Took to the Woods” is largely a collection of folk vignettes about life in northern Maine. There is less discussion of the flora and fauna of the area than there is description of the lifestyle adopted by the Richs and the characters living in the woods along with them. Mrs. Rich titles her chapters with questions she is often asked by people from outside (things like, “aren’t you ever frightened?” and “but how do you make a living?”). This device inserts the skepticism and judgment Mrs. Rich feels from the outside into her life in the woods. Rich is consistently comparing life in the woods to life on the outside, explaining that she keeps busy keeping house, is entertained by the motley characters with whom she shares the woods, and is intellectually stimulated by the majesty of her surroundings. For the greatest part, “We Took to the Woods” is a picture of how Mrs. Rich views her experience in the woods vis a vis the expectations of outsiders.

While many books about life in the woods amplify the solitude and elevate the narrator as a pivotal figure within his natural surroundings, Rich treats herself always as a visitor in the woods and describes the woods as a phenomenon she has had the opportunity to observe rather than the home and neighborhood in which she lives. In telling of an annual fishing trip to an especially remote pond she underscores the notion of humans as visitors in the woods.

There is that feeling of remoteness and calm and timelessness about it that makes the scramble of ordinary life seem like a half-forgotten and completely pointless dream. It just lies there in a fold in the hills, open to the sky and wind and weather. Ducks and loons breed in its coves, the gulls fly over it in great white arc, and the great fish go their secret ways in its dim depths. Once in a while, human beings, like Gerrish and me, invade its privacy, but we don’t make any impression on B Pond. I always have the impression that the whole valley in which it lies- the hillsides and the deer on the hills, the trees that grow down to the water and the birds that build in them, the pond itself with all its myriad life- simply waits for us to go. I always want to turn back, after we have entered the woods on our homeward trek, to see what enchanting things take place the minute our backs are turned. (281-282)

Rich's Winter House

Despite Mrs. Rich’s attempt to cast “We Took to the Woods” as a collection of responses to questions from the outside, she associates herself more closely to outside life than to woods. In blatant disregard for archetype, Rich never paints herself as having, “gone native.” She remains aware of her status as an unnatural presence in these woods, and acknowledges that the social trappings of the lives we share with each other are more hers to claim than the seasonal ebb and flow of the woods. In sharing her reaction to a day of berry-picking in Prospect, Mrs. Rich expresses her hopes that in death she by able to truly join the natural world in which she is merely a visitor in life.

At night, after being at Prospect, I lie in bed and see great clusters of berries slide by endlessly against my closed lids. They haunt me, there are so many of them yet unpicked, so many that never will be picked. The birds and bears and foxes will eat a few, but most of them will drop off at the first frost to return to the sparse soil of Prospect whatever of value they borrowed from it. Nature is strictly moral. There is no attempt to cheat the earth by means of steel vault or bronze coffin. I hope that when I die, I too may be permitted to pay at once my oldest outstanding debt, to restore promptly the minerals and salts that have been lent to me for the little while that I have use for blood and bone and flesh. (289)

When I first read “We Took to the Woods,” I was hoping for a condemnation of social behaviors and an auto-adoration of this figure who rejected civilization and gained favor in the natural world. This book instead gave me a depiction of the remote life as an analog to the urban one, and a portrayal of the narrator as always a part of the outside world intruding on the naturalness of the woods. As humans, we can never truly shake of that sense of “society,” nor can we ever live alone and truly naturally. Mrs. Rich’s argument seems to be that, nevertheless, we can still live simply and meaningfully, and be well entertained.