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THE PAST IS NEARER and farther than we believe. My father was born in 1898 into a world without airplanes, with only a hint of the automobile, when telephones were novelties, electric power was far from universal, a world in which electric trolley travel was a decade old, when a scant hundred miles of paved roads existed in the U.S. By the end of his childhood, the world plunged into WW I, when most miracles and curses of modern industrial technology were created and developed.
I grew up on the eve of WW II, with the inventions and processes of modern science and technology once again refocused on destruction. Between 1900 and 1950, the world changed more than in the previous 5000 years. We reshaped the globe, spread weapons and tools of change everywhere, poisoned the surface of the planet and the depths of the oceans and wafted radioactive elements in our air. In America the credo became “Change, Forever Change!” and never Faust’s wish, “Hold, thou art so beautiful!” We built and leveled, created and destroyed like dancing Shiva. Zealous missionary modernists, we flaunted the banner with the strange device—“Make It New.”
But despite our effort to obliterate and transform the past, the old world peeped through. “The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there.” The past is also infinitely strange, because we try to forget it, to dis-remember it, to deny it. To meet a very old person now—medicine and engineering make that ever more possible—is to meet a being from another planet, another culture, another order of reality. They heard, smelled, touched, saw things we will never know. My father might have watched passenger pigeons on the wing or have seen in the flesh Teddy Roosevelt, heard Enrico Caruso or George M. Cohan sing onstage.
I know the weirdness of ancient America, because fragments lingered into my own youth. The nation geared up for war, we were exhorted to support the War Effort, but we also resurrected the past. Modern dairy trucks were blocked up For the Duration, and old milk wagons and horses went back on the routes. The vegetable and fruit man put away his converted school bus and brought brown horses in from the fields to pull a wagon. The scissor man—a gypsy, I believed—always used a horse cart and so continued. The world of the horse, banished by automobiles, trolleys, railroads, reappeared, down from the cultural attic, refurbished for the emergency.
Other past practices and semi-forgotten knowledge were resurrected. We learned how to plant home gardens, what to grow, how to deal with perpetual uncertainties of weather, pests, poor soil. We learned to repair, refurbish, make do. It was no sin to wear worn clothes, patched shoes and hand-me-downs, to put up with visible shabbiness and outdatedness. The government bombarded us with slogans, posters, flags, armbands, ration stamps and ration books, how-to-do-it pamphlets, exhortations to moral and social frugality and virtue that would have gagged us a few years earlier, when we desperately wished our way out of the Great Depression. We were reassured the sacrifice was only For the Duration, that we would be rich, healthy and happy beyond all dreams after we whacked the Axis and made the world free for democracy—again.
Meanwhile, I observed a world half futuristic and half antique, governed by unknown physical and social rules. We had to save tin cans and fats, gather milkweed pods and newspapers, drag junk from attic and cellars to become howitzers and fighter planes. We were to sacrifice days to the men fighting over the horizons, shown on strange battle maps on newspaper front pages—hedgerows of arrows and twisted lines, flags and dragon’s teeth, places no one had heard of in any geography class: Kwajelein, Tarawa, Pelelieu, Iwo Jima, Alamein, Arnheim, Stalingrad, The Bulge. It was fantasy or science fiction, tales of alien worlds with unearthly languages, people (I saw them in the newsreels!), black and naked in New Guinea, brown in sheik’s robes in Morocco, in sealskins in the Aleutians. People who said Awk and Urgh and Gug, not human words or phrases, people without flags and shoes and modern weapons and Royal Crown Cola and Cream of Wheat for breakfast.
In winter, I heard the milkman, the horse jingling his harness, old wheels creaking, soft swush of wheels in snow, clop of hooves on the asphalt street, eerie celeste music of a milk bottle arpeggio. It was a tale of wonder compared to the quotidian experience of a milk truck’s flatulent sound. A horse! I thought, as excited as Richard III, my kingdom, and I got a horse! I would look down from my bedroom window to see the horse and wagon climb our hill, the milkman wading in the snow, the horse patiently waiting and then—magically!—walking ahead to the next stop on his memorized route, breath wreathing back from his wide horse nostrils as he leaned into the collar and tugged the wagon along, without effort. I envied the milkman as I envied no soldier, sailor, airman hero in the noisy war movies I absorbed every weekend.
In summers I was up and out to see the horse, to (with permission) reach up and touch his amazingly soft, velvety nose, to smell his sweet breath and the leathery aroma exuding from his skin. Then I might see the fruit and vegetable man and his horse, an older black-brown horse, bigger and more aloof than the milkman’s pony. He—or she: who knew from horse genders?—looked down on children and customers and endured the indignity of standing in the traces, waiting to be used. He often wore a nosebag, achieving a bandit-like appearance and an air of thoughtful preoccupation. It seemed impolite to interrupt him at lunch.
The scissor-grinder (actually an all-round everything sharpener) was fascinating in and of himself. He was short and stumpy, dressed in gaudy shirts (polka dots!) and wore oily mustachios out of cartoons. He had a thick accent and a sharply limited English vocabulary. On the end of his cart hung a foot-powered grindstone and several sharpening machines. He did not mind if we kibitzed while he coaxed fountains of sparks from an ax blade or a sickle or a cleaver. His horse was a smaller pony, grayish and a mild depressive. He ignored us and stared off at the horizon as if dreaming of a barn, pasture or manger. He had a very long mane and equally impressive tail, but he did not exude the raw power of other horses. I remembered the bad boys transmogrified into donkeys in Pinocchio. He looked as if he might recall a past when he was a foolish, truant schoolkid.
The scissor-grinder blew a brass trumpet or fish horn as he came around, and the fruit and vegetable man rang a bell on his wagon. The milkman was a silent fixture, however, subtle and self-effacing, respecting dawn slumbers. The horse-drawn vehicles exuded a powerful feeling of the past—the crafted wooden wheels, creaking wagons and harness, hoof sounds, horse snorts. Not even cowboy movies conveyed the reality of a society that lived in consort with horses, for whom horsepower was the upper limit of energy measurement. It was a moment from history for me to relive, the past revived in flesh and blood.
The horses brought with them a sense of creaturehood, of life with animals who were not decorative or entertaining, like house pets, but as utilitarian and necessary as a car, a radio, an electric range, a vacuum cleaner. For two or three years, I grasped what farm kids at school already knew—that humans had a long partnership with domestic animals on whom they depended for health, life and comfort. Animals, in that world, were not optional—they were indispensable. They had to be cared for, understood, loved or known intimately in a bond different from a human-to-human relationship. They also had to suffer, to be hurt and to die in thrall to humans.
The horses left signatures, too—steaming horseapples up and down the town streets, rude calling cards. I was repelled but then realized the horse turds were odorless and made of densely packed, undigested grain stems and leaves, like wads of chewed-out tobacco old men spat into the gutters. The horse apples were almost decorative in those gray wartime years, and they signified the stark reality of life—they were “country matters” hidden from us townies, not forced to see and hear animals brutally slaughtered, to witness the backbreaking labor of planting and harvest, to smell the henhouse or the hog wallow or risk stepping into a fresh cowpie. Our food came in tidy cans and packages in stores, prepared, measured, sanitized, labeled and bowdlerized.
The horse apples reminded us that animals served us, they ate and shat, lived, breathed, bled and died in servitude. Horse apples were a tax on life for us, more real than abstract war news, promises of a utopian future awaiting us. Horses were here and now, inarticulate, inaccessible to demands and importunings. They were the animals Walt Whitman dreamed of turning to live with—simple, alive, apparent, unplagued by beliefs and ideologies, anxieties and desires and tragic losses. Their steady breathing and big soft eyes opened windows into a world the iron machinery of war and progress and the future tried to obliterate. The old workhorses moved among us like angels, self-effacing companions of eternity. It was a brief, wondrous gift to know them, horse apples and all. ###
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luminance
