Last month, Julie left for ten days to attend a family reunion. I was left alone with Juno. We survived, mostly due to a five-pound meatloaf that Julie had left in the refrigerator, although toward the end of the ten days, I brought a rotisserie chicken home from Costco to give variety to our diet. Now and then Juno snacked on dry dog food, although she much preferred meatloaf and chicken skin. I ate the broccoli and cauliflower and cucumbers in the crisper drawer and the avocados ripening in a basket on the kitchen counter, consumed my usual shredded wheat/yogurt/blueberry breakfasts, and drank a pot of coffee before noon every day. I faithfully took my CoQ10 and vitamins.
I did break training once by having a prime rib dinner at Redfish Lake Lodge. I saved the fat scraps for Juno, who was happy to break training as well.
As Julie was leaving, I told her that any mess I left—the ribbons and confetti and shattered wine bottles, at least—would be cleaned up by the time she returned, although I couldn’t guarantee that the blown speakers and broken windows would be replaced or that the new carpet would match the old one.
Julie didn’t take me seriously. “If only,” she said.
For excitement, I read a couple of books and the new issues of Harper’s and the New Yorker that arrived in the mail. I mowed lawn. Cleaned house to my standards, which meant that Julie would clean it to higher standards once she got home. Scrubbed, mostly successfully, the ceiling of the microwave oven. Unloaded the full dishwasher and instituted a bachelor’s one-pot-one-plate-one-fork-one-bowl dishwashing regime. Gave Juno her weekly brushing and marveled, as usual, that one dog could produce that much hair. Drove to town for the mail a couple of times.
I also spent some hot afternoon hours digging out the grass-clogged sections of the irrigation ditch that runs through the property.
It’s hard work, but it’s cheaper than joining a gym. It involves jumping up and down on a shovel until it cuts through eight inches of tough and muddy sod, prying a chunk of roots, mud, and grass up from the ditch bed, finding and severing all the hidden roots keeping the chunk from moving, and finally lifting the entire mess up onto the ditchbank before starting the whole process again.
I can clean ten feet of ditch in an afternoon. Exhaustion becomes a factor at twelve feet. At thirteen feet, I usually stagger back to the house to sharpen my shovel, take a shower, apply Benadryl ointment to my mosquito and horsefly bites, and go to sleep on the couch.
When your spouse is away, the schedule doesn’t leave much time for anything else.
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Ditch digging empties the mind, silences the roof-brain chatter, exhausts the body, and allows you to treat the physical world as the recalcitrant but modifiable object of your ambition. You can divide the length of the ditch by thirteen and determine if you’ll have enough days to be done by Christmas or if you’ll have to start chopping through the ice New Year’s morning. If you get tired of listening to inner silence, you can resort to counting: tallying up the tons of mud lifted onto the ditch bank, the square feet of sod moved out of the flow of water, the inches of shovel sharpened away with your grindstone.
In similar fashion, you can count the bottles of dishwasher detergent saved by simply soaking your pan, plate, and fork in the sink until you need them again. You can rejoice that your dinner menu doesn’t require the agony of choosing between more than two entrees. You can make the bed once and sleep on top of it in a sleeping bag, and never have to make it again. Clean house once and forever after change into a Tyvek suit in the foyer. Shave the dog.
The bachelor’s dream: to go through life with a quiet mind, a clean house, a free-flowing irrigation ditch, a hairless dog, a humming microwave, minimal dishwashing, and cases and cases of shredded wheat. In the closet, a mounting pile of the plastic containers rotisserie chickens come in. I await the development of rotisserie meatloaf.
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Julie is home now. I was glad to see her. She was glad to see me. She had a good time with her family, but they made the most of a week of hiking through the Desolation Wilderness above Lake Tahoe, so it’s taken her a week to rest up and recover. She has found time to mop the floors and prepare a shocking variety of meals. I’ve resumed my honorable support role as dishwasher. Julie’s cooking produces lots of things to wash, including the odd food-preparation devices that she has found in cooking stores.
I have no idea what they’re for. I do know that humanity made it through its first quarter-million years without them. I don’t question the cook.
I still prepare the occasional one- or two-pot meal for both of us, just to show it can be done, but early on in our marriage we decided to go with our strengths. So I cut the firewood, empty the mouse traps, mow the lawn. Now and then I sweep out the garage (it’s overdue). I write this journal so people in the far future can see how improbably we lived, and how much we took for granted, and how at least one of the Old Ones, living in an unstable climate where irrigation is a mostly obsolete phenomenon, could dig ditch as an act of meditation.
Do I do my share in my marriage? I like to think so. Julie might not agree, especially if she’s scrubbing the kitchen floor or editing my mazelike thoughts.
But we tend not to keep score. We both know that marriage requires far more effort than living alone. Alone is more efficient, more logical, and less entropic than living with another. But we would get lonely, I think. At least I would.
Furthermore, it’s dangerous to isolate yourself, physically and emotionally, from your fellow humans. You can end up like Howard Hughes.
No matter how unattractive our species becomes during wars or tourist seasons, it’s impossible to stand outside of your DNA. That DNA has its own imperatives, and they’re contrary to the impulse to drop trees over every highway leading into the valley. They overcome the impulses to live alone, to simplify life rather than complicate it, to dig ditch rather than invite friends over for a glass of wine.
You don’t want to live as a hermit. You don’t want to give free rein to your own priorities without considering the wants and needs of others. You don’t want to cut yourself off emotionally from others. You will end up with a hole in your life, and eventually that hole will swallow everything.
I’m right about this, at least as far as my own life is concerned. I know I can’t live alone. Thirty years of being one-half of a couple has convinced me that I can’t live any other way. Julie and I have grown together to the point where it will take death to separate us. Besides, that’s what we promised on our wedding day.
The older we get, the more we realize that’s what death promised, too.
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The dark side of love is grief. I knew that even before I fell in love with Julie. I knew that people change, get old, and die. When they do they take a part of you with them. I knew it was dangerous to love the beauty of a fall day too much, a job too much, my youth too much, the world too much. If they don’t leave you, you leave them.
I’ve told Julie if I’m lucky, I’ll be the first to die, and since I’m male and older, the odds are in my favor. Julie seems to be okay with that. There are moments when I worry that if I fall over while digging ditch, there will be a socially approved period of mourning for her, and then there will be a great liberation in her life. The constraints of marriage will evaporate, my heavy brooding on human evil will no longer oppress her, and she’ll be free, for example, to run away and join the circus.
It won’t happen that way. Grief will be involved. Anger at being left behind will be involved. Conversations with a missing person will be involved. The purpose of life will become fragile and arbitrary, and the freedom once yearned for will be empty and lifeless. I know all this because I’ve imagined what my life would be like without Julie. I know all this because I’ve seen other long marriages broken by death. I know all this because Julie wasn’t here for ten days, and when she came back, she brought so much of life’s meaning back with her.
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If there is a happy ending to all this, it comes in digging ditch or something like it, where you become whatever it is you’re doing, and you’re able to banish language from your mind.
When I was twenty years old, I was a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service, and I spent five days a week by myself. For much of the summer, I was in areas rarely visited by other people, and I noticed that after four or five days of not talking to anyone, words disappeared from my head. I didn’t talk to myself. I didn’t recognize things by their names. Language became shape, became sound, became the wind etching the surface of a lake, or a sudden slap of thunder, or spindrifts of pollen rising out of a lodgepole forest, or the call of a sandhill crane across a meadow.
We become different animals without language, ones who occupy an eternal present. Language tempts us into the past or the future, which become the repositories of grief. Also ambition, rage, blind hope, and other human miseries. The ability to name things is a divine curse.
But love can exist in the present. Love doesn’t require language. Neither does ditch digging, of course, or pain, but neither of those things is incompatible with living in the now.
The present is a good place to have been for the last thirty years, and given its deep relationship with eternity, I’m expecting it to last a while longer. Longer than loneliness, at least.