Drinking the Rain: A Memoir
by Alix Kates Shulman
Overview
From the Publisher
At the age of 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.
My thoughts
Wow, um, talk about 180! The book starts out with a 50 year old woman leaving behind her house, her kids, and her husband for a bit of a sabbatical on an island in Maine where she tries to discover herself. That part of the book I liked. I was interested in how she manages, happily, without the modern comforts of home. I enjoyed her discoveries of eating food fresh from the ocean, and sampling the greens around the island. That part was great! Then the author goes back to the city and the book turns sort of new-wavy, then she heads to Boulder, CO and the book takes on a psuedo spiritual tone and then, well, the whole book is disjointed. I thought I was reading one book; turns out I'm reading three.
It's a good book -- I'm enjoying it. But it's taking some pretty out there turns. It's not what I expected, and I think I'd have been happier to stick to the stories about the nubble.
Favorite Passage
The Chautauqua management, to forestall the water pipes freezing, advises setting our thermostats high and letting taps run throughout the night, as well as keeping vessels filled with reserve supplies of water, just in case. After my adaptation to scarcity on the nubble it's hard for me to waste heating fuel and hear unused water dribble down the drain, especially since my pipes freeze anyway one Friday night despite the precautions. After that, I revert to my nubble discipline, carefully conserving my water reserves until the maintenance crew arrive with blowtorches to thaw the pipes under the cottage.
When they enter the crawl space to get at the boiler, what should they find but a cozy camp complete with dirty sleeping bag, the past several weeks' newspapers, flashlight batteries, empty soup cans, and a few old men's clothes. Evidently,someone has been living beneath my kitchen floor, taking comfort in the heat of my boiler. Though I'm startled, I take the news of the squatter far more calmly than does the management, who sends around a workman to install a padlock on the flimsy door to my crawl space depsite my protests. I see no reason to cut the poor soul off from the meager possessions when he's been so unobtrusive a tenant that I haven't even noticed him, and there's no access to the cottage from below. After a couple of days I unlock the padlock and leave it hanging on the hasp for the rest of the winter in case he should return.
I doubt he'll come. But, no longer afraid of the hacker, I never check below to see, preferring to leave him in peace as he has left me.
