a place of total welcome

(or: darkness, and those who live in the heart of it)

Welcome to Chasing the Wind. This is an essay series engaging with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, chapter by chapter, from the viewpoint of an unabashed admirer (me). Here’s the preface explaining why I’m doing this. And here’s the playlist with five new wintry hearth songs added to it. Cheers, friends.

“In the side of what had seemed to be a snow-bank stood a solid-looking little door, painted a dark green. An iron bell-pull hung by the side, and below it, on a small brass plate, neatly engraved in square capital letters, they could read by the aid of moonlight: —

MR. BADGER.”

We have left our intrepid traversers of the Wild Wood in quite the pickle at the end of chapter 3, shivering in the cold and wet, waiting on the results of their bell-pulling. Their hope, like ours, is founded in the nature of the animal behind that dark green door — the one who has only gruffly greeted us from the sidelines to this point, the one you must only take as and when you find him. Mr. Badger shuffles into the story grouchy and reluctant, peeking around the page with a delightfully revealing greeting.

“Now, the very next time this happens,” said a gruff and suspicious voice, “I shall be exceedingly angry. Who is it this time, disturbing people on such a night? Speak up!”

This greeting confirms for Mole (and for us) everything that Rat has already told us about Badger. Despite what appears to be numerous interruptions to his solitary way of life, Badger has room for another. He threatens exceeding anger, just… next time. He’s more bark than bite, and in fact exceedingly kind. Once he has identified the beggars at his door, his grumpy voice immediately changes to one of paternal care — a care that is revealed further upon entering his home.

The first glance of Badger’s den is much like the first impression he makes: rough and shabby, a bit mysterious, with hidden rooms behind closed doors. Then, with haste born of deep concern for his Wild-Wood-worn friends, he readily flings open those doors and we are introduced to the warm interior life of Badger.

Badger’s kitchen glows. The well-worn nature of the place (“shiny with long wear”) belies a comfort in familiarity. He has made use of this place, not in the nature of using it up or consuming it, but in employing and enjoying it for good purpose, in caring for it while understanding its proper vocation as a welcome to weary animals in the heart of the darkest place in the Willowverse.

Every inanimate object in Badger’s kitchen appears to awaken when Mole and Rat enter the room; the dishes, the furniture, the very framework of floor and ceiling greets them as it greets itself. This is a place of total welcome.

“It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.”

Yes, this is Badger’s home. But isn’t it also every home that has held our affections throughout our lives? Isn’t it the March home in Little Women, cluttered with such an overabundance of life and love that even Timothée Chalamet longs to enter in? Isn’t it Bag End, built securely into a hillside and stocked enough that it could host a party of thirteen dwarves and a wizard at a moment’s notice? Isn’t it the house of Tom Bombadil, rooted in the halls of darkness and danger and yet more carefree than any other place in Middle Earth? Isn’t it Green Gables, the Burrow, Redwall Abbey, the Beaver’s house, Aunt Beast’s cave, Caer Dallben, the house of the seven dwarves in Snow White?

These homely places we love and long for share similar characteristics — not shapes or structures, but sensations. Treebeard’s glen does not even have walls, but it is safe. The Beaver’s house is not spotless, but it is well-provisioned. Green Gables is not full of people, but it is full of care. When we enter a true home, we have moved up Maslow’s hierarchy from the physiological needs of shelter and food to the deeper felt needs of security, belonging, connection, and acceptance.

But that is not to say that Mr. Badger’s domicile is not replete with provisions for the other needs of his guests.

Here we find places within places. The kitchen in which they find themselves is equipped with that most useful of homely shapes, the corner. The chimney-corners are “tucked away in the wall,” protected from any chill that might come winding around a guest’s wet feet. The settles, a piece of furniture we would most likely find in a pub these days, are high-backed and often high-sided benches capable of fitting several guests — the perfect place for a private conversation among friends. Notably, they are “shiny with long wear.”

Here also we also find the simplest versions of physical and social warmth. The fireplace kicks out heat without interference from wires or vents, with the added benefit of “merry firelight” that “flickered and played over everything without distinction.” We forget, perhaps, in our modernized houses, the benefit of a living light source: one which is born and dies in the space of an evening, one which you have to tend to keep it going, one which moves and breathes with the atmosphere of the room it inhabits.

But Badger is also all warmth toward his friends. He places them close to the light and warmth. He clothes them. He tends to their wounds. He prepares them a simple dinner. And the effect is that of driving away their fears and sorrows, pushing back the night beyond through the simplest of means: kindness.

“In the embracing light and warmth, warm and dry at last, with weary legs propped up in front of them, and a suggestive clink of plates being arranged on the table behind, it seemed to the storm-driven animals, now in safe anchorage, that the cold and trackless Wild Wood just left outside was miles and miles away, and all that they had suffered in it a half-forgotten dream.”

It’s telling that Badger’s care and concern for Mole and Rat extends beyond pretense or societal convention. As conversation finally commences around mouthfuls of food, we immediately see that Badger cares less for etiquette than he does for his guests.

“The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once. As he did not go into Society himself, he had got an idea that these things belonged to the things that didn’t really matter.

Kenneth, parent that he is, takes care to parenthetically state that this is “too narrow a view,” though he doesn’t have the time to explain why. He’s too busy lifting warmth off of the page to get into it.

But this is characteristic of some of the most whole homes I’ve been in, that while courtesy matters, it does not rule. We cultivate manners to show children how to treat others with respect and kindness, but manners mean little when it comes to true friendship. In fact, one of the delights of friendship is moving beyond manners into a space of equal regard, kindness, and confidence. Here, the fences of etiquette fall away, replaced by pleasant boundaries born of mutual love.

I’m struck by how quickly a friendship can be developed in this setting. Remember that Mole has never met Badger, only heard of him. The elements of striking such a friendship up — one which deepens as the chapter goes one — involve entering into one’s space both physically and figuratively. Badger opens his home and himself up to them, as he has done with innumerable animals before, but he does not require them to open up to him. Notably, he listens, without a hint of judgment or correction.

… he did not seem surprised or shocked at anything, and he never said, ‘I told you so,’ or ‘Just what I always said,’ or remarked that they ought to have done so-and-so, or ought not to have done something else.”

In this moment, Badger doesn’t care one wit about proving himself right or teaching them a lesson. We see in future chapters that he doesn’t hesitate to scold an animal (cough Toad) if it is required. But with Rat and Mole, he has the wisdom to see that what is needed now is comfort, not remonstrance. In this way, he reveals that his friendship toward others is rooted in prudence and tact, virtues so often missing from our modern conceptions of relationship.

We take a brief break from this portrait of fraternity for an update on the hapless Toad, who has racked up a seven-car body count and three hospital stays due to his startling lack of prudence. This provides us an opportunity to observe the truism that friends ought to do something when another friend is making an ass of themselves, as well as a hilarious aside about how animals would never “do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.” Badger reminds us once again of the wisdom of the Preacher: that there is a time for everything under the sun… and winter is definitely not that time.

Accordingly, warmed by the Badger’s insistence that they sleep in as long as they damn well please, they end their evening by leaping delightedly into (coarse but clean) beds and falling asleep in an instant.

The next day we find that Mr. Badger has invited more waifs in from the cold, a pair of young hedgehogs who conveniently got lost on the way to school. Come to find out, everyone is snowed in. If the suggestion of this wasn’t delightful enough, Kenneth sends Otter round, who gets positively mellifluous on the subject of a snowy Wild Wood. We’ve just had the biggest snowfall of the season here in northern Indiana, and I must say, Kenneth/Otter is in fine form here.

“My! it was fine, coming through the snow as the red sun was rising and showing against the black tree-trunks! As you went along in the stillness, every now and then masses of snow slid off the branches suddenly with a flop! making you jump and run for cover. Snow-castles and snow-caverns had sprung up out of nowhere in the night — and snow bridges, terraces, ramparts — I could have stayed and played with them for hours.”

Badger appears shortly thereafter, and as breakfast runs into luncheon (as it does when you’re snowed in), we get a further glimpse into how he has maintained such a grounded way of life, i.e. by living under the ground itself.

I find this bit intriguing, not only as a preface to the following chapter (“Dolce Domum”) but as a foil to the first chapter, when Mole hangs spring cleaning and leaves the stifled confines of his subterranean home for spring above ground. Mole praises the virtues of rooted living, and Badger is all over this. Talk about a shared experience!

“... you know exactly where you are. Nothing can happen to you, and nothing can get at you. You’re entirely your own master, and you don’t have to consult anybody or mind what they say. Things go on all the same overhead, and you let ‘em, and don’t bother about ‘em. When you want to, up you go, and there the things are, waiting for you.”

In short order, we see that underground living offers identity and protection, lack of judgment, and “above all, no weather.” You get freedom from the noise and bother upstairs, and freedom to expand “if your ideas get larger.” Badger is delighted by the common ground Mole has opened up with him, and consequently invites him on a tour of his home.

Come to find out, Badger’s home is actually as big or bigger than Toad Hall, an immense maze of corridors and chambers that used to be part of an ancient human city. In a nod to Ozymandias (or perhaps an English version of the Atlantis myth), we discover that the people who built the city were confident chaps who “built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.” So, Mole wonders, what became of them? Badger answers him thus:

“People come – they stay for a while, they flourish, they build – and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”

After the people left, the world took over.

“It was all down, down, down, gradually – ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help. Leaf-mould rose and obliterated, streams in their winter freshets brought sand and soil to clog and to cover, and in course of time our home was ready for us again, and we moved in.”

Badger doesn’t just offer us a humbling reminder of our own frailty as a race, of the consequences of hubris and the law of entropy. He also offers us a vision of permanence and change rooted in enduring patience and observation, one that understands the march of time and gets in step with it. In some sense, he’s the epitome of the conservative Russell Kirk describes in Ten Conservative Principles:

“In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night,” (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.”

In his tracing of the history of his home, Badger gives us an alternative, animal perspective to that of our modern age. He says, in effect: get about the business of living so thoroughly in the present that you cease to bother yourselves about the past or the future. He does not rail against the current state of the weather, he builds a home and invites people into it. He does not worry about what tomorrow will bring, but submits himself to the seasons. Kenneth says that we would do well to listen to this animal wisdom. After all, the Wise Guy himself said that God tests mankind “so that they may see that they are like the animals.” (Ecclesiastes 3:18)

The perspective balances out the other personalities we have encountered in our journey through the Willowverse: the passionate and impetuous Toad, the naive and sincere Mole, the easy-going and artistic Rat, the pugilistic Otter. It appeals to Mole as someone who longs for stability, who remembers it in his own home. As ever, we are pulled between the pilgrimage of road and river and the solidity of home. As ever, we love the place we inhabit even as we long for a better country and our true home.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. … I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account.” (Ecclesiastes 3:12, 14-15)

As Mole, Rat, and Otter take their leave, we see one final glimpse of the antagonist of these chapters, the Wild Wood, still “dense, menacing, compact, grimly set in vast white surroundings…” They turn for home, the hope of it kindled in their hearts by their concentrated experience of it in the home of Badger.

And Mole, in a foreshadowing of the chapter to come, reflects on his own place in this story.

“Mole saw clearly that he was an animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden-plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime.”

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No AI was used in the making of this essay. Cover art by Ernest Shepard, as captured by Bibliodyssey. I offer all current essays here for free, but you can always go paid to dig into the archives and support my writing habit.

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