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“ In
this single day I've taken a journey encompassing subway, bus, jet,
taxi, ferryboat, van, and finally shopping cart and my own two feet to
wind up on a windswept beach at the tip of an island fifty minutes out
to sea. ” |
NOTE DE L'ÉDITEUR
: At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with
political
activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a
small cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Living without plumbing,
electricity, or a telephone, she discovered in herself a new
independence and a growing sense of oneness with the world that
redefined her notions of waste, time, necessity, and pleasure. With
wit, lyricism, and fearless honesty, Shulman describes a quest that
speaks to us all : to build a new life of creativity and
spirituality, self-reliance and self-fulfillment.
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JOAN TAPPER :
Take the idea of Robinson Crusoe. It's virtually an island
cliché : a person alone on a desert isle,
solitary and self-sustaining. Though many of us might fantasize about
living like that, few of us would actually do it.
Alix Kates Shulman, however, embraced that solitude.
Summer after
summer for the last ten years, she has lived alone in
an unheated, unplumbed, unelectrified cabin on a rocky spit of land on
Maine's Long Island. Drinking the Rain is a
thoughtful, even inspiring, chronicle of
her experience there.
The cabin had been the scene of 15 years of family vacations
with children and friends. But on May day in the
early 1980s, Shulman arrived alone, wheeling a shopping cart of
provisions and gear across « the nubble
» that separates the property from the rest of the
island.
[…]
Shulman depended on a cistern of rain-water for
drinking and washing, a cast-iron stove for cooking,
an unpredictable gas-powered refrigerator for
cold storage. There was an outhouse (albeit with a
magnificent view of the ocean). There were apples and berries
for the picking. For other needs, she made a weekly
trip to town, buying food, telephoning home. The rest of
the time she kept to herself.
She settled
into this hermit's life, poring through the school texts and
odd novels ont the cabin bookshelves, learning to think the
« long thoughts », as the
called them, musing on age, environment, existence.
But gradually, even in this stripped-down
setting, all extras were sloughed off, as the writer
turned to the foods nature offered : mussels from
the rocky pools along the ocean, crabs and fish, as well
as sorrel, dandelion, and mustard leaves, angelica, sea
rocket, and on and on.
All that is described
with a deliberate grace and a delight in the process
of insight that time has not dampened. Shulman is
neither an ideologue — she never proselytizes — nor
an ascetic. In fact, she loves food and revels in the exotic recipes
she puts together.
Periodically Drinking the Rain follows the
author out of the island, as Shulman tries to
integrate her Maine lifestyle with her life on the island of
Manhattan. Ultimately, she simply gives each
place its due, letting the social ties of the
Manhattan winter enhance and balance the aloneness of the
Maine summer. It's an attitude — an
acceptance — that she comes to apply as a general
philosophy, since the world cannot help but intrude into even
a recluse's life. She worries about the effects of
pollution on the wholesome, unprocessed foods she
depends on, and rumors of development threaten quiet
Long Island.
Over the decade of her story, Shulman grapples with
the realities of time's passage : turning 50, the
disintegration of a marriage, new companionships, and new
enthusiasms that range from hiking to New Age
ideas. But the description of the nubble and of the joys of
solitude remain the most memorable passages, infusing the book
with a sense of peace and contentment.
Drinking the Rain is about conquering fear
— of deprivation, of old age, of being alone. In
these pages Shulman has bestowed a gift on readers who may
never be able, or willing, to nibble a dandelion leaf
or gather mussels from a cove, a testament to the idea that
less is more.
And
ironically, by sharing her island with others, she
may have made it more thoroughly her own.
☐ Islands, Vol. 15, 4, July-August 1995
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