`As My Back Knows'

Once the “Lettuce Capital of the World,” Kent, Washington, is today lush only with warehouses. It’s a space filled with spaces in which people store their stuff while moving between other spaces – in other words, moving companies and storage units, businesses consisting mostly of organized space. I spent Monday morning in one of them, and it’s a humbling experience to see one’s earthly possessions neatly packed away in six wooden crates, each about the size of Thoreau’s cabin. I was there to divide our goods into two piles: those that go to the house we’ve rented for the next 12 months, and those that will be stored in another, smaller, climate-controlled space elsewhere in the former “Lettuce Capital of the World.”

The moving company is admirably efficient. Everything was boxed, labeled and inventoried in Houston and unloaded, undamaged, in Kent. I had the unexpected pleasure of watching a forklift driver hoist our plastic-wrapped living room couch – heavy, long and perfect for reading – and set it deftly atop three stacked crates, 30 feet above the floor. With the aid of two young warehouse workers, one of whom was studying to be a police officer, I removed one side of each crate and evaluated the contents piece by piece. Only their forbearance and straight-faced professionalism kept my embarrassment within bounds as we uncovered snorkels, plastic bins of underwear and bras, wicker baskets of plastic Easter eggs, a Spiderman scooter and boxes of outdoor Christmas lights – life’s guilty detritus, the sight of which always prompts me to ask: Why do I own all this crap?

The prize, of course, was not the antiques or crystal but my books, stowed in dozens of tape-sealed cardboard boxes redundantly labeled “BOOKS” by the movers. Even boxed, books are recognizably denser than towels and dishes, and their heft implies substance and worth to some of us, or at least pain in the lumbar region. I lifted the lid on one box to reassure myself the contents remained intact after their 2,400-mile journey from Texas, and felt the way I do at night when I check on the kids in their beds. On top were the two volumes of The Wings of the Dove in the New York Edition – a good omen, for those are books I’ve been hauling around and rereading for more than 35 years. Stacked in a lopsided cube, awaiting transport to the rental house, my boxes of books looked like a burden and a blessing, and I was reminded of Thoreau’s famously self-deprecating observations in his journal on Oct., 28, 1853:

“For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers’ still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man's wagon, -- 706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have ever since been paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”