Transcript

Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson. Every so often, you can find the most amazing treasures right under your feet, if you just know where to look.

Sheila Bedi: I can get you started, and then I'll get it set for you.

Anne Strainchamps: Sometimes a little technology helps.

Sheila Bedi: You're going to hear the ground and the iron that's in it, because it's a high, nice, crisp tone. There's no guesswork. It's clear. Okay.

Steve Paulson: We're getting a lesson in metal detecting in our field in central Vermont.

Sheila Bedi: If I hear a tone, I'd say, I would definitely dig that.

Anne Strainchamps: This is our neighbor, Sheila.

Sheila Bedi: Sheila Bedi. I bought my first detector when I was seventeen, in 1986, and I'm still doing it. Ten detectors later.

Steve Paulson: So should we just start walking up the hill here?

Sheila Bedi: Sure.

Anne Strainchamps: Steve and I have been walking up and down this hill for years, and we've found all kinds of remnants of older lives up in the woods -- logging trails, stone fences, cellar holes. But Sheila grew up here. She knows this place in a way we never will.

Sheila Bedi: I sledded when I was a kid -- I think we sledded here and we sledded there. My friend Allison, her great-grandparents had the little house that was here.

Steve Paulson: Metal detecting is her window into an even older history. She's found coins and bits of jewelry that date back to the mid-1800s, and sometimes even older.

Sheila Bedi: If you found a pewter button, you might think that was colonial.

Steve Paulson: Have you found stuff that old?

Sheila Bedi: I have. I have like ten to twelve pewter buttons I've found out here. My husband's like, "oh great, another button." I was like, but you don't get it --

Anne Strainchamps: Are you kidding? I would be so thrilled.

Sheila Bedi: I know. The person -- what did they wear when they lost it? Those are the things I think about. Sometimes when I get lucky enough to find a piece of jewelry, I think to myself that there's a lady on the other side who's like, great, you brought my favorite pin back for people to see, or you found the ring I lost and now somebody gets to see it again. And I was so proud of it when I had it, or sad when I lost it. So those are all things that draw me to do this.

Anne Strainchamps: Am I doing this right?

Sheila Bedi: Yep, and I would keep it as low as you can, rub it right along the ground.

Anne Strainchamps: There's a lot of walking and sweeping the detector back and forth, lots of jokes about needles and hay fields. But then

Sheila Bedi: I would dig that.

Steve Paulson: Here's your shovel.

Anne Strainchamps: I guess that's just a huge tree. Here, you come dig.

Steve Paulson: Okay. I mean, I don't want to destroy this. It's probably pretty tough.

Anne Strainchamps: While we're digging up rocks, Sheila finds something better. An ox shoe.

Steve Paulson: An ox shoe? Wow.

Sheila Bedi: Ox shoes are typically from the colonial times.

Steve Paulson: Wow, that is totally cool. Look at that.

Sheila Bedi: I was going to call you over, but it was kind of scrappy. I didn't want to bring you over for nothing.

Steve Paulson: Oh, my God, wow.

Anne Strainchamps: No, no, that's so cool.

Steve Paulson: So how old do you think this might be?

Sheila Bedi: I feel like late 1700s -- you know, they used an ox shoe for something like a hundred years. That's in really good shape. This could be one of the conversation pieces.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, absolutely.

Anne Strainchamps: Honestly, a colonial ox shoe would have made my day. But there's a lot of field still to cover.

Sheila Bedi: And this is what we do -- we just wander around aimlessly.

Anne Strainchamps: There's heavy packed dirt there, there's something -- oh, now you gotta dig it out. A small rectangular shape with an opening in the middle.

Steve Paulson: It's kind of green, made of some kind of thin metal.

Anne Strainchamps: It's worn and tarnished -- that looks really old.

Sheila Bedi: Are you ready for this? I think this is half of a colonial shoe buckle.

Anne Strainchamps: What, a colonial shoe buckle?

Sheila Bedi: Yep, I've got a couple.

Steve Paulson: So when you say colonial, are you talking 1700s?

Sheila Bedi: I am.

Anne Strainchamps: Oh my God, when the nation was new. Like some colonial dude was walking around in his fancy shoes.

Sheila Bedi: You earned that one. Now you're bit by the bug.

Anne Strainchamps: Oh, absolutely.

Sheila Bedi: You'll want to go out more.

Anne Strainchamps: Yes, I'm going to want to go get my own. Yeah, these, wow.

Needless to say, that colonial shoe buckle now has pride of place in our house. It sits in a small dish near the front door, along with the oxen shoe, a musket ball, and half of a bent silver spoon -- all found right here under our feet.

Steve Paulson: Living alongside all this history is an amazing feeling, and one that's shared by the writer Daniel Mason. His 2023 novel, North Woods, tells the story of a single New England house over the course of several centuries. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Anne Strainchamps: And he's just come out with a brand new novel, Country People, also a bestseller, about a California family who moved to southern Vermont. Though I think it's set in the present day, right, Steve?

Steve Paulson: Yeah, and it has a much lighter touch. It's more of a comedy. But both novels are asking similar questions about what it means to have a deep sense of place. And both North Woods and Country People take an almost mythic approach to this New England landscape. They're steeped in natural history, in the geology, in the native plants and animals. It's almost like they're part novel, part field guide.

Anne Strainchamps: Which is interesting, because isn't Daniel Mason a native Californian?

Steve Paulson: Yeah. He's a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and part of that long tradition of doctors who are also writers. And that's worth mentioning, because one of the themes of Country People is the thin line between imagination and delusion. Some of the characters believe that the earth is hollow and they're searching for a cave that leads into a magical kingdom.

Anne Strainchamps: Realistic novels that conjure an ecology of enchantment. Let's listen.

Steve Paulson: So Daniel, I would love to start with a reading from the very beginning of Country People, which I think really sets the place that you are writing about. Could you read that?

Daniel Mason: Sure. So this is an excerpt from an article called "Local Legends," supposedly published in the Greensbury Trumpet on July 17th, 1982.

Spend any time in this corner of Vermont, with its lonely woods and narrow roads. Talk to the hunters, to the old loggers, or the farmers, and sooner or later, you're going to hear the story. At first, it will come to you in scraps -- the quarry where a body was found, the cavern with its strange echoes, the old Windmaker farm, its silo overgrown with creeper. Long abandoned, everyone says, and yet you'd swear you'd seen, you'd heard. Or maybe you'll find one of the objects, like melted knots of iron turned up by your shovel or denting your scythe.

Steve Paulson: So you have invented this whole fictional universe for the story set in southern Vermont. And it's not just the characters -- it's not just the fictional town where it's all set. There's also a kind of mythology of local lore. And as someone who spends part of the year in Vermont, I can tell you, you have really nailed it. I've sort of wondered what it is that's so distinctive about this. I think it's because of all the history that's right under our feet.

Daniel Mason: Yeah, it's lovely for me to hear that. I think that the landscape is striking not just because of its natural beauty and its changing seasons and so forth, but also because of how ever-present a human past is. So you walk around in the woods and you encounter old stone walls. You may encounter a cave, but you also find something in the cave. A friend was just telling me the other day how he had turned up the ruins of an old carriage on his property. And so there's this past that's very present, no matter where you go.

Steve Paulson: So what I find so remarkable about being here is, history is not just out there, far away. It is like right on top of me. There are cellar holes in the woods right above our house here. There is a cemetery a mile away that's hidden -- you can't see it from the road. But if you go up there, you find gravestones dating back -- there are men who fought in the Revolutionary War there. The headstones go up to the 20th century, but no one's been buried there since, and yet the town still maintains it. It's just sort of amazing that it's all right here.

Daniel Mason: Right. For a novelist, it's a bit of a dream, right? You could go to a cemetery like that and look around, and every single one of the gravestones suggests some kind of story. And I remember many times in writing both North Woods and Country People where I would just wander into a cemetery, which is there, which is present in every town, often right alongside the most common roads anywhere in New England. And you might find a couple who died in the same year, or a child who died very young, or a person who died during the period of a war. Every single one of those suggests a kind of story.

I think also what's very striking to somebody who's from the West and doesn't live around cemeteries is that it suggests death is -- I don't want to say common, but it's present. A person doesn't just disappear when they go away. They remain somehow nearby, alongside the road, but also interspersed with natural life, which I think is something you've probably observed many times in Vermont as well. Even though the cemetery is maintained, there are still wildflowers growing between the graves, apple trees growing next to the headstones. And so you have this mixing of human and natural life, which is very much alive, despite it being in this territory of the dead.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. So what I find so interesting about all of this is you're a Californian -- you grew up in Palo Alto, right? You teach at Stanford. Is it the contrast with California? Is that the thing that's interesting?

Daniel Mason: There are a lot of contrasts. So there's the history, which I think is very noticeable to somebody who's grown up in California. In California, everything is new. Every home that I lived in in California has been younger than I am. Every apartment building, younger than I am. Every once in a while you'll find a historical marker tucked away behind a mall, but there's much less of that. Certainly there was a long history before Europeans came, and there's a long history after, but you just don't see it very much -- certainly not the way you see it in New England.

I think the other thing that was quite striking to me was the presence of the seasons. To be in a place where every month it changes, where there's a different group of plants that comes along, the weather changes and the clouds are different -- there's something about the natural year, the calendrical year, which itself is a narrative, right? The plants are born, the plants grow, the plants die, the animals come and eat the plants, the trees shed their leaves. These are all active verbs. This is not just a passive, static landscape. And so I think that having that moment of contrast, and sitting down and really noticing it for the first time, was quite striking to me -- still is.

Steve Paulson: So we should talk some about your book. Can you give a brief summary of Country People?

Daniel Mason: Sure. So the impetus is very autobiographical -- it's the story of a family of four Californians who spend an academic year in New England. Apart from that, it sort of takes off on its own. So in this story, there's the husband, Miles, who is a troubled academic -- a man who's been trying for fourteen years to write his dissertation, and constantly gets sidetracked. He's changed topics a dozen times, and right now he's writing about the concept of the peasant in Russian folk tales. And the family somewhat humorously believes that they can learn about Russian peasants by going and living among --

Steve Paulson: Country people in Vermont!

Daniel Mason: Right. And it really shows what kind of city people they are. His wife is a much more successful academic -- she's an expert in Milton and Blake, and she's the one who's been given the academic appointment. So they travel across the country with their two kids and their dog -- significantly, the dog plays a significant part in the book. And it's set up in this fictional town called Greensbury. Miles, the husband who's supposed to be finishing his dissertation, soon finds himself utterly distracted, like he is most of the time -- in this case, meeting anyone he can, learning about the local area from anyone he can, and then increasingly finding himself on a series of absurd adventures that eventually veers into the fantastical.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, so one of the things that I love about Country People is you really get the quirky nature of Vermont. My experience is there are a lot of very smart, often quite eccentric people -- I'm not always sure where the line between brilliant and crazy is. To take one example, you have this character who goes by the name Snowflake Bentley, who's a real figure in Vermont history who mastered the art of taking photographs of snowflakes.

Daniel Mason: Right, you can't think of a more wonderful historical character. He dedicated himself to this apparatus that involved a black piece of velvet that caught snowflakes and put them underneath a microscope. And he's the person we owe this observation to, that no two snowflakes are alike. In the book, it's a very different Snowflake Bentley. Miles has injured himself skiing, ends up in an emergency room in the middle of the night, and in typical Miles fashion, decides he's going to pass his time by sitting next to the person who he thinks is going to be the most interesting person to talk to -- who in this case turns out to be this man who believes he hears the voice of the original Snowflake Bentley, and in fact, maybe is a kind of reincarnated version of him. So he's the second Snowflake Bentley. Miles, instead of being frightened by this man and what seems to be a clear delusion, is instead fascinated by him. And the second Snowflake Bentley ends up being a kind of guide to Miles, showing him around the countryside, introducing him to other people, and eventually explaining some of the stranger goings-on in town.

Steve Paulson: He's one of a few people in the town who have formed this kind of semi-secret society which believes that the earth is hollow and there's some sort of magical kingdom inside it. Can you tell me what it is that these people believe?

Daniel Mason: They believe that the geology we were all taught -- that the earth is solid at its core -- is actually not the case. Instead, the earth is like a giant tennis ball, and if you tunnel in through a series of caverns, which they think can be found somewhere in southern Vermont, you'll find yourself on the inside of this hollow earth, beneath this other sort of internal sky, where there happen to be these kingdoms, and you can find animals that have gone extinct in New England still continuing to live there. And I should say, this is a belief that's in the book -- Jeremiah Wilkes, the man who supposedly found his way down these tunnels into the center of the earth, is a fictional character. But the belief that the earth is hollow is one I found right there already -- one has encounters across all literatures and myths and great classic literature, like Dante, but also lots of science fiction.

Steve Paulson: Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth. Or the fairies in Celtic mythology who live underground but then come out to make mischief for the rest of us.

Daniel Mason: Right, right. So they believe this thing, which on the surface seems pretty wacky, but has these very deep connections to a lot of what's so important to us.

Steve Paulson: And the other thing that's striking is, the idea in your book is that if they just find the right cave, they can enter into this magical world. And there are a lot of caves around here. And I know stories of people who have gone exploring in caves and have not come out. That is part of the local lore here.

Daniel Mason: Yeah, that's great.

Steve Paulson: Well, not so great if they never came out. But anyway, the stories are incredible, and they live on here.

Daniel Mason: No, not so great if they got lost. Although if they found their way to a beautiful underground kingdom, maybe it is.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, maybe. So one of the reasons why I related so strongly to your book is that we have this mysterious stone structure on our land, in the woods right above our house. It's this six-foot-tall thing, looks like a cairn -- a pile of rocks. And I know it's at least seventy years old because our next-door neighbor saw it as a boy. I've asked all kinds of people around here what this thing is, why it was built, and no one knows. I emailed an expert on New England stone walls, sent him photos, and he didn't know either -- he said maybe it's some sort of folk art. And I have this one relative who's a member of this fringe archaeological society, and he said, "oh, it's the Vikings who built it" -- because there is this lore that the Vikings or the Celts came to Vermont before Columbus. And I just find it fascinating that there is this thing, this stone structure on our land, and no one knows what it is. It's kind of glorious, this mystery.

Daniel Mason: What's your theory?

Steve Paulson: I honestly don't know. I mean, it's beautifully preserved. So, getting back to your book, there is a literary angle. You mentioned Miles has been working on Russian folktales, so he is naturally drawn to the fantastic. And then Kate, his wife, she's a professor of Milton and Blake. And so you were conjuring up the visionary writers here. It's like a literature of wonder, is what it sounds like.

Daniel Mason: Right. But they are very different people. She studies her topics with a rational mind -- she's disciplined, she's rigorous, she reads all the secondary literature. She loves Milton -- in fact, Miles falls in love with her watching her read Milton, and feels jealous that other people can be in the room and watch her read Milton at the same time as him. But she's an academic, she's serious. Miles starts out that way too, but part of his problem, as I came to know him, is that he's not interested in this whole secondary apparatus. He's not interested in studying them, not interested in explaining them. He wants to experience the stories fundamentally as stories, as a child would experience them. He's an unrepentant teller of stories to his children -- constantly, every night, he'll tell a different story, invent a different world for them. And I think he sees the topic of his academic interests in the same sort of way. These are great tales that open up a kind of wonder at the world of the fantastic, the possibility for creation and for imagination. And he just can't seem to understand these other adults who need to explain it.

Steve Paulson: So how much of you is in Miles? I mean, obviously you're not the failed academic, but in terms of this love of storytelling.

Daniel Mason: Yeah, I think I identify with him a lot more than I identify with Kate. I admire her -- I have colleagues like her that I'm always in awe of. But at the same time, I think that in some ways a novelist is a person who exists in a state of uncertainty, exists in a state of wonder, exists in a state of possibility. And the books I've always loved have been ones that don't explain themselves away -- books in which characters remain somehow slightly beyond our reach, and in which the plot always remains sort of there -- there are possibilities that may or may not be real, but there are many possibilities. Those are the stories that I like.

And so Country People, in many ways, explores ideas that I love. So, for example, the question of what's the difference between a delusion and imagination is an academic question which people have thought about very rationally and cogently, and I find their arguments fascinating. But at the same time, when I come to the topic, I don't know the answer to a lot of these questions. And so what I can do is create characters who live in this world and grapple with the same sort of questions, but never really come up with a definitive answer.

Steve Paulson: Well, we should mention that you are also a professor of psychiatry at Stanford. And I do know that you have taught a class with an anthropologist there, Tanya Luhrmann. This is exactly her area of study -- where's the line between delusion and reality? And she studies psychosis, among other things, looking at people who say they hear voices or have visions from the beyond. And what do you do with that?

Daniel Mason: Tanya has been a wonderful colleague -- we've been teaching this class for almost a decade now. And the class really asks: how can we understand this very broad range of human experiences? And while it does offer some kind of explanatory framework, I think that neither of us is really interested in saying "this is a hallucination and this is a vision," but rather in taking an approach that looks at what the subjective experience is like, and really trying to capture as broadly as possible the amazing diversity of perceptual experiences that people have, both now in our culture and in cultures around the world.

And this is where Tanya is really an expert -- looking at the broad diversity of these unusual, or one might say usual, since they're very common, experiences -- sort of special sensory experiences around the world -- but also then thinking about how people have experienced these different kinds of experiences across time, and how central experiences, which may be clinical in some contexts, like hallucinations, can be experienced very differently in other contexts.

Steve Paulson: Right. I mean, maybe they're visions of the divine -- Teresa of Avila, who had this vision, or this experience, supposedly, of being pierced by an arrow from an angel.

Daniel Mason: Right. There's a wide range. And the fascinating part is that many people have tried to understand this, right? So even religious visionaries have their own explanations for something which might be a vision versus, say, something caused by an illness. It's a distinction that cultures around the world make.

Steve Paulson: So as a novelist, I totally get why you'd be fascinated by this, but you're also a psychiatrist. And I'm assuming that part of your job is to assess the mental illness of people who might come to see you. Do you approach these questions differently depending on what hat you're wearing?

Daniel Mason: It's a great question. The most important part of my job as a psychiatrist is that I'm assessing these questions when a person is in distress. And so that's a big difference from, say, a character in my book who might have an ecstatic vision, for example. In a clinical context, a hallucination is not an illness until it's causing suffering. And so that's a situation I sometimes find myself in.

There's this amazing Brazilian artist named Arthur Bispo do Rosário, who did this most extraordinary piece of artwork, gathering garbage from around the asylum where he lived for most of his life, on the command of voices that told him he needed to do this. And there's this amazing moment in an interview with him where a woman comes by and says, "this is extraordinary, you create all this beautiful art." And he says, "I'm doing this because I'm told to do this. I don't want to do this -- I would stop, but the voices drive me on further." And it's this very poignant moment that I share with my students when I teach, because it's very easy to have this romantic vision of him as a visionary artist. And yet at the same time, we have this testimony of him talking about how this vision -- which allows us to see this very beautiful art -- is also something that causes great suffering for him.

Steve Paulson: Well, going back to your novel, Country People -- my reading of this society, the ones who believe there's this magical kingdom in the center of the earth, is that they seem pretty happy about chasing after this imaginary world. They don't necessarily exactly believe it, but they like entertaining the idea that it's possible. And that seems -- I'm very interested in the experience of enchantment, and that seems like a bit of enchantment to me, to hold on to something like that.

Daniel Mason: Right, no, absolutely. And I think that people in that group -- some of whom absolutely believe this is the case, and they're totally certain, and there are people who are incredibly skeptical of it but are there because they're curious -- but the large majority of them sit somewhere in between, in this space you describe, in which they have this sense that the world is not just the world as we see it, that there is some kind of magic in it. In the woods, which seem instantly magical to anyone who goes into them, or in a cave, which seems instantly magical to anyone who goes into one -- you can argue against enchantment all you want, but then just go into a cave in the middle of the forest and try to argue against enchantment. It's very hard. And so they come from that space of believing that there is something else.

For them, it's taken the form of this possible underground world. They've also found a lot of community there, and I think that's a big part of Miles's experience in this search to find this enchanted kingdom -- these people find each other, and it's that kind of connection which I think drives a lot of their participation in this project. And I think it's something that always made me wish there was a similar sort of society around me, because I would love to be off in the woods, spelunking, studying old manuscripts, trying to find where a grave was. Even at the end of the day, I believe the earth has a solid core. Still, I would happily take part in this kind of adult play, imagining that the woods contain so much more.

Steve Paulson: So I have to tell you about an experience I have walking in the woods right around our house in Vermont. A couple times a week I go out -- there's this one-hour loop walk I do with my dog. It's high up, sort of on this baby mountain. I've never seen another person there, so it's kind of remote. I sometimes try to imagine being in conversation with certain trees. And I don't know -- are you familiar with a chapter that C.S. Lewis wrote called "Let's Pretend"?

Daniel Mason: No.

Steve Paulson: So he wrote this chapter -- he was a Christian, he wanted people to become Christians, and he said, imagine talking to God. And so for me, it's not trying to imagine talking to God, but trying to imagine talking to trees. Not literally. And it's hard to do, for me. It's sort of like it takes a certain mindset. The woods do feel a little more enchanted like that. Does this make any sense to you?

Daniel Mason: It resonates so strongly with me. I found I have the habit -- when I wander in the woods and I find, for instance, a moth or a caterpillar, something I didn't expect, I often find myself speaking to it, addressing it, in a kind of astounded sort of way. People would probably think I sound a little crazy, saying "hello, little friend" to it, but it seems like this other creature, who's occupying this space in the forest at the same time, is perceiving me at the same time that I'm perceiving it. We have this moment of -- Martin Buber's concept of I-Thou-ness -- and it may be frightened of me, or it may think I could be dangerous somehow, or it may be disinterested in me, but we're there in that space. And that feels very magical.

And I also find myself in these moments thinking about what it's like for a child to be there -- this is why childhood ended up being such an important part of Country People -- because for a child, a fantastic creature is often indistinguishable from the kind of creature you'd encounter in the woods. If you were to say that there was a creature with gigantic wings the size of a hand, but thin as paper, colored with all sorts of spots that looked like eyes, that hung from the underside of trees and made itself look like a leaf -- this sounds like a completely imaginary beast, right? And then you see a luna moth. I saw my first luna moth for the first time last year, and it's completely astonishing -- I couldn't have come up with a stranger, more wonderful creature than this luna moth. I discovered the magic of a loupe, like a little microscope, moving it over something and seeing how small things can become even more extraordinary. You couldn't have thought of it, even if you were trying to create some of the strangest creatures you could imagine.

Steve Paulson: We're going to take a short break, and when we come back, we'll talk about creating enchanted worlds and how we might imagine life from the perspective of the animals around us.

Anne Strainchamps: Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead -- I'm really excited about them. And here's a tip: maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. I hope you like it.