Columns
Crow's Caws
| Crow's Caws Thursday Was Cabin Day |
by Crow Cohen
When I asked Euan Bear, our new editor (yippee!), what I could write for this Spring issue, she said, “Tell them about how you connected to nature, you know – the bugs and the plants.” So I decided to share an edited excerpt from my memoir that describes how I combined my love for the natural world with my emerging lesbian feminist politics.
Cultivating a passion for nature saved my ass when I found myself in young adulthood shlepping around the country after my husband who had enlisted in the Air Force. We were lucky enough to buy a cabin – which I still have – in the mountains for a little weekend retreat even before we owned a house.
Thursday was Cabin Day – a day off from my family. I needed a place all by itself – a place to contemplate all the stirrings within me. I began to wonder if I needed to push my feminist politics to their ultimate conclusion and become a radical lesbian feminist. Our one-room authentic log cabin built in 1949 was exactly what I had dreamed of ever since I read about Sylvia Ashton-Warner and her “Selleh” – a crude writing shack built in the woods of New Zealand away from the main house and her large brood. She reminded me that women had souls – tiny inner voices that could be detected if given time and space away from the demands of husbands, bosses and children who could suck our minds and bodies dry if we let them. Up there in the foothills of Camel’s Hump mountain, I could live out my fantasy of being a creative genius, a devoted wife and mother, a world-famous author, and a radical lesbian feminist revolutionary.
The dirt road turned into a one-lane logging road. Our cabin was a half-mile down that wild forest lane. Every time I went there, I felt like I was about to rendezvous with a lover. There she was, tucked away like a gingerbread house with a sudden green lawn and a screened-in porch. The cabin smelled musty like summer homes when you first open them up after a long winter. I loved that smell. It meant I was opening up a door to my inner being that had been closed all week.
My favorite book at the time was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. But unlike Annie, I insisted on weaving my encounters with nature into my politics. I liked to study bugs because I considered them an oppressed group. Besides, it was easy to look like an expert naturalist when you knew a few details about insects. Our fear and loathing of insects was the key factor in man’s drive to conquer nature. If paranoia is about fear of being invaded, then bugs are the beings that can literally enter into our bodies – chiggers, lice, the occasional insect that crawls into our ears when we’re asleep, worms which can live in our intestines (they aren’t insects, but close enough). They can bite us, torment us, even kill us. Most of us feel nature is fabulous except for the bugs. So I cultivated a passion for bugs and other creepy-crawlies.
Armed with a hand lens and a field guide to the insects, I roamed the meadows and woods peering at critters. Once I sat at the edge of a pond mesmerized as a male salamander snatched up a female from behind to mate with her. I forgave male aggression in nature. Salamanders had permission, in my mind, to act out the battle between the sexes because they existed in a balanced universe devoid of institutionalized male dominance.
I wasn’t particularly afraid of animals. Great-horned owls woke me, wild turkeys gobbled in trees, coyotes dashed across a meadow at dawn while I sat writing in a beanbag chair. A deer left her fawn to tremble in my front yard. An ermine once crawled into the loft where I was napping on a sunny winter afternoon. A large black snake dropped out of that loft and slithered away once. Snowshoe hares stood still for me hoping I wouldn’t notice. Once I encountered a huge moose when I emerged naked dripping from a stream. Animal scares were adventurous.
I was, however, frightened by men. When I stayed overnight, occasionally a car full of rowdy drunks would drive past the cabin at midnight up the dead-end logging road. They parked at the end of the road for a long time probably doing drugs. I couldn’t relax until they drove out. But those scares were part of learning to be independent.
The implications of switching from being a heterosexual Air Force wife, mother of two, to being a radical lesbian feminist were enormous. It was easy to remain a purist on the top of a mountain; but I was a creature of neighborhoods and corner stores, backyard gardens and ringing phones. I really didn’t have the stuff to throw my lot in with nothing but owls and weasels forevermore.
It was time to leave. Coming down off the hillside, I often felt I had been on a pilgrimage. But how would I tell my beloved straight family that the underpinning of all oppression was the systematic, institutionalized domination of women, and that one of the most cunning tools of the patriarchy was heterosexual marriage?
When I pulled into the driveway of our home in the village, Bess was playing in the yard while Barry was hanging diapers on the clothesline. They seemed unbearably innocent. I smiled but didn’t say much as I slowly climbed out of the car. I was the returning hero, but they didn’t know it. I was the lesbian homewrecker. They didn’t know that either. I felt dreadfully fragile.
Crow Cohen is a lesbian feminist from Winooski.