By Nathan Heath '19
I believe in a brain that rests and an ear that listens. Not the sort of listening you do in intimate conversation, but the listening you do everywhere else: listening to the natural world, to city sounds, to groups of people, to silence. My father taught me this valuable lesson when he fell asleep smiling at a Christmas party last year. He was always eager to attend a dinner party. He relished the company and the occasion and delighted in the prospect of meeting new people—and he loved free food. He repeated the same routine every time I accompanied him to one of these events: He would arrive, peel off his coat, and drift over to a table of hors d’oeuvres, where he’d encounter a stranger and sink into happy conversation. Several hours later, he’d claim a spot on the host’s sofa, and several hours after that, we might leave. The final step was never a guarantee—if he’d had anything more than one glass of wine, he’d remain fastened to the couch for an extra hour or so. On one mild evening, incidentally, I found him cemented into a leather armchair with his now-empty glass of New Hampshire IPA. “Dad,” I chuckled. “We just got here!” He smiled. “I’m absorbing the evening, Nathan. You never truly appreciate the joy of a dinner party until you sit back and just… listen. You listen to every noise—every noise at once—but you focus on none of them.” He smiled again. “It’s the happy hum of conversation that you miss when you’re talking or listening to just one person—or when you’re chewing.” I turned to refill my root beer and lost his words in the jolly commotion of the evening. But he was right, I realized. I remembered all the times I sat below the big oak tree in my front yard listening to the leaves as they tossed above my head. I remembered the time I got lost in New York City—how I sat down, defeated, on a park bench and calmed myself with the murmuring throb of traffic. I remembered that translucent Vermont morning when the lake lay in silent slumber before the birds began to sing. And I remembered most of all the peace: carefree, absolving, almost gleeful peace. He must’ve been right, I figured. He drifted off in that armchair several moments later with an empty glass in his hand and a smile engraved on his face. I was in need of no more proof: He was perfectly peaceful. So I believe in listening—in opening the ears but resting the active mind. I believe in finding peace in the natural hum of the world. And I believe in falling asleep to the warm scent of human concourse.
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By Jonathan Rufino '19
On the eastern bank of Halfway Pond, about seven miles from Norton, Vermont (population 169), and a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, stands a quaint off-the-grid log cabin. It’s my family’s happy home for a couple weeks late in the summer each year. Situated just below the forty-fifth parallel, the rustic dwelling requires, to say the least, dedication to reach. There are no roads to facilitate a journey there, no signs to assuage doubt as to the way, and no hint that a cabin might lie at the end of the trek. The walk through the forest is like an odyssey to another simpler world, another long past time. With each step down the barely evident grassy trail from the shoddily paved Hurricane Brook Road to the cabin itself, I shed an element of my stressful life at home. Every morning there, I wake up to the trickling of the pond water through the grassy marshland just a few feet from the cabin. The sunlight, pushing in through the slits in the wooden wall, devises nonsensical shapes on the floorboards. And the birds, like faint muffled bells, tinkle a contented “good morning” from the trees. Taking leave of the coziness of my cot, swinging open both the wooden and mesh front doors, and stepping outside into primeval nature at its purest state is simultaneously soothing and overwhelming. I look across Halfway Pond to the raw and untouched forest on the western bank, then turn my eyes southward to where the pond water begins to move, spilling into the mile-long Hurricane Brook. The sun filters through the green leaves of the intimidatingly tall trees while squirrels and insects scramble like cogs in some unpredictable machine of nature. The day might be spent rowing or swimming in the freshwater Halfway Pond, trekking in the dense forest, or reading in the tranquil shade of the cabin. More often, though, it’s spent in silence, drinking in the purity of nature. There’s nothing in that place even remotely reminiscent of the outside world. No car horns, no sounding telephones, not even any light pollution at night. So if it’s anything, it’s an escape, a place that I sorely miss for the eleven and some months of the year when my life is occupied by deadlines and pressure. It’s somewhere I can remind myself that, once in a while, it’s worth it to just stop and appreciate what’s around me. It’s incredible. Or at least it would be, if it were true. As far as I know, there aren’t any log cabins outside Norton, Vermont, and there surely aren’t any belonging to my family. I don’t know about the trees and bushes on a path which may or may not exist, I’ve never seen Hurricane Brook, and I’ve certainly never swum in Halfway Pond. But there’s a reason I can describe this place. It’s because yes, every long night when I push through to finish that last bit of homework, every stressful evening when I’m plagued by uncertainty about how I did on that test, and every painful morning when I drag myself out of bed, I’m thinking of this hypothetical relaxing log cabin on the New England marshland. This is fernweh. Simply put, fernweh is a German word, translating loosely to “wanderlust” and more specifically to “homesickness for a place one hasn’t ever been.” Coming from the words fern (far) and weh (pain), it’s a feeling we’ve all felt at some time or another. So no, I’ve never been to any peaceful cabin in the woods, let alone one in Vermont. But still I know this place. I’m homesick for it, though I’ve never set foot in it in my life. Just like everyone else, I’m a victim of fernweh. |
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