“A few years ago,” Peter Matson’s narrative begins, “I thought to find a place to live removed from the influences of the city, a simple place to be with my children on weekends, where vegetables would grow and water would come out of a well. Like many before me, I soon discovered that what I wanted was a house like none I had ever seen, and that to realize it I would have to build it myself, with my own hands.” He chose for his homestead that beautiful part of Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains which remains worlds apart from the summertime explosion of culture mavens and tourists. Two years and 235 pages later, he and his family would celebrate the day when they could move from sleeping bags into a completed house.
If, at first, Matson seems to sound like a latter-day Thoreau, we can soon (and gratefully) correct this impression. So far from being a transcendental proto-hippie he is a junior partner in one of New York’s high-powered literary agencies—an occupation usually conjuring up images of three-martini lunches, transcontinental phone calls, and a table at Régine’s. Clearing woods, putting up posts, turning a pre- Revolutionary barn frame into a comfortable dwelling—doing all this on weekends, after selling words in Manhattan all week long—Matson was engaged in a considerably more difficult undertaking than was the cop-out from Concord who, in addition, never had to worry about mortgages, state building permits, or the high cost of lumber (let alone of a septic tank).
Comments