Ross Douthat - The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery

For a long time I would always wake up early. Some mornings there would be a moment when I was conscious but not yet fully aware of my body, just a mind floating lightly in the dark. But then very quickly I would feel the weight of things, my legs and chest on the mattress, my head heavy on the pillow. And then quickly too, the pain would be with me once again.

The first sensation was always something differenta heavy ache in the shoulder Id been sleeping on, a pan-fry sizzle on my hips, a throbbing at the very front of my skull, an intolerable vibration inside my ankles. Then it spread and varied as I pushed back the blanket and fumbled for my phone, shoving my mind into the glowing screen while my body shuttled through its symptoms.

Sometimes I would lie in a cramped position scrolling Twitter, picking up fragments of news, chasing threads of arguments from overnight, letting the pain work through my limbs and joints, watching the clock slowly creep toward 5 a.m. That was on a good morning. On the bad ones, I would be forced up quickly, staggering to the bathroom, leaving Abby to sleepI hopedin a snow fort of blankets on the far side of the bed.

The house was old, so very old, but the bathroom was newan expanse of tile, a shower like a grotto, a his-and-hers sink with drawers for both of us below a sweep of mirror. The floor was even supposed to be heated in the winter, but the system had been on the fritz since we moved in, and the wall panel flickered in the half-light with a gibberish of broken digits.

I moved around the room like an acolyte tending to different altarsnow planted on the toilet or hunched over it, now leaning heavily on the glass door of the shower, now standing at the sink staring at my haggard, puffy face. I opened the drawer beneath and fished out a bottle of pillsone bottle among many, filling compartments meant for combs and soap and razorsand swallowed one, two, a handful. After a while they would hit home, and I would shimmy my legs, flail my arms, stretch my face muscles into a silent Munchian scream. Except when the pain was deep, layers down inside my chest, and there was nothing to do but sit with it on the cold, unheated floor.

The light would come up gradually, the clock on my phone creeping on toward six. Eventually I would leave the bathroom, sometimes wrung out and exhausted enough to fade back into a twenty-minute sleep, but sometimes still aching and burningin which case I would pad through the master bedroom, past my blanketed wife, out onto the landing at the junction of the houses long T-shape.

Through one door our daughters lay asleep, in two identical white beds in a room whose floor sloped downward toward the corner where the foundation had settled, long New England years ago. Through another our infant son stirred in his crib. The hall stretched away down the length of the T, and I followed it, the floor creaking a little, to what had once been a servants bedroom, sealed away with its own bathroom near a back stairway to the kitchen.

The extra bedroom was supposed to be an office, a place to write away from the noise of kids and the babble of the social life we imagined hosting. I did do a lot of my writing there, on a drop-leaf desk with books stacked around it and a lamp propped up above. But the main thing inside the desk was a further supply of bottles, squat and round for pills and slim for tinctures, stamped with leaves and berries, mosaics and inscriptions, Chinese characters, a dragon chasing his own tail. And beneath the drop-leaf I now stored a box, a black console with buttons in red and green and white and blue, with a tangle of red and black cords running out from it, and metal tubes where the cords ended, just the right size to be gripped in an adult human hand.

On either side of the desk were windows, old colonial frames with slightly mottled glass, looking out and down, offering a view of the landscape in the soft gray morning light. Just below was a wide flagstone patio, with a little lawn pasted in between a white garage and stone steps leading leftward toward a pool. Then the lawn reached a picket fence, beyond which the ground fell away in levelsfirst a spill of boulders, then an overgrown path, then another drop to a field that went red and brown all winter but came back green with spring. I could see tall grass and cattails rising from a damp low-lying patch, before the pasture climbed to a granite knoll and a single ash tree, a sentinel of the woods that waited just beyond.

The light spread and the landscape brightened, putting on its taunting beauty once again.

I bent to the desk, gripped the metal tubes, and turned on the machine.

1.

A Dark Wood

I always wanted to move back to New England.

My wife and I both grew up in Connecticut: Abby in a green town just far enough from New York to count as the country, me in the rust and brick and Gothic of New Haven. My mothers family were Maine Yankees from Puritan stock with a solid three-century history of staying put in chilly soil. My wifes ancestors were from Newfoundland and Ireland, cold seacoasts and autumnal skies. As kids, we both made the long drive to Maine in the summersin my case to the coastline where my grandparents lived and my uncle and cousins worked as lobstermen, in her case to a Girl Scout camp way up in the North Woods, cabins speckling the shores of a deep-blue lake under the shadow of Katahdin, the highest mountain in the state.

So living in the humid marshland of Washington, D.C., where we ended up together and married in our twenties, always felt like a mistake. The Mid-Atlantic was almost like the Northeast, but just slightly different in its temperature and color schemesmore sweltering in the summer and less vivid in the fall, with more winter rain and June warmth than our remembered childhood worlds. I would have preferred a stark contrast, the prairie or the Rockies or the Californian chaparral. Instead the resemblance just reinforced our mutual homesickness for deep woods and colonial houses, birches and evergreens, old stone walls and blizzards.