Pastoral
By Robert Olmstead

"I have never seen another country yet. The border held mystery for me. Ever since I was a child, I dreamt of traveling most of all."

Pushkin

Place. A certain order of ideas. A felicitous arrangement between the mind and what the mind senses. Poets and scientists make a fetish of the words that name the body of place. With the mere invocation of these words our minds spontaneously associate and our eyes begin to float with misty reminiscence. We project our love onto place and our young selves, however far they may have wandered, remain there forever to be held by its green paws.

For me, the Monadnock Region is not signified by granite, or greening forest, or stranded mountain, but the fluid river. The Connecticut River is a contradiction- a magic border that simultaneously flows and defines. In my boyhood the river, that ungraspable phantom, was a place going somewhere. It was always going somewhere, even at night as I slept on a hill that overlooked its languid and sometimes urgent progression to the sea. The river was a portal to the world beyond and even now when I cannot sleep, or am likewise discontented, there is a memory I give myself, one that stirs me to feeling and for which I have no fear of forgetting or losing.

It is a winter morning, gray and cold, and I am driving a blue tractor onto rising land from a lower meadow curbed round by the Connecticut River. After gray and cold comes warmth and sunlight lemony and cracking the snow fields white and they groan in their dormancy and awakening. Frosted hairs from a cow's switch string the barb wire. The saw of spring is coming through the pines that comb Daggart Hill and that flat black misted river rests in the curve of my eye.

This memory is clear and eidetic and lives in my mind today as if a birth, as if a glyph scratched in stone. This memory is the setting of my boyhood where diesel engines, Holsteins, winter fields, meditation and water are wedded. This place, this moment, call it the galvanizing of my imagination, has since traveled with me around the world.

My mother constantly reminded me not to play at the river. Consequently, it became the torment of the forbidden and made for an everlasting itch to be by its side. It was the river that could kill me--and take me away. Her family came to New England three hundred and fifty years ago. John marched from Dover, Massachusetts at the Lexington alarm. His ninth child, Jonas, manufactured the Chickering piano. His fourth child, Timothy, bought a farm in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. Timothy's grandson Albert dealt extensively in highly bred Durham cattle. Albert's grandson, Samuel John, was my grandfather.

As a boy my mind ignited with stories of red-painted indians, tomahawks, settlers with muskets at the ready, horrible predations perpetrated upon the weak and innocent, our American heritage of fear and violence. With these stories the flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open and I think this is when the strictures of time and place broke for me. The past became an always present. Time did not progress and was not sequential, but centrifugal. Home was a place that did not possess me, but emancipated me. It was the very depth of my heritage that liberated me and at a very young age, I found myself dangerously free.

***

Another memory. The evening of September 19, 1820, an elephant named Horatio leaves Putney, Vermont for Westmoreland, it being the intention of his owners to exhibit him in Boston that winter. Smoke drifts down the river and the air smells of creosote. Colliers to the north are turning the forest into charcoal.

It is late in the year and the weather long ago made its winter turn. They had a tranquil and prosperous summer touring the Hudson to Albany and then moving east on silky moonlit nights. Soon it will snow, a condition none of them want to reckon with, especially the slaves Othello and Preaching Dick. To them, snow and cold are a fearsome thing and they cannot understand how one lives where it is so common.

At the bridge near Britton's Ferry they pause. The Major hands the gatekeeper a few coins and then he and Preaching Dick move out, the hooves of their horses resounding dully on the planks that serve the bridge and prompted by the Captain and Othello riding in the rear, Horatio lumbers forward.

Suddenly the Major's horse shies and twitches her ears. He turns on the forehand to relay the foreboding she has communicated. But it's too late. Horatio steps on a weak cross-timber the horse sensed and Horatio and the Captain and Othello and Preaching Dick disappear through the bridge floor. How horrible to see their heavy falling into rocky and pitiless blackness.

The horses, their sleek necks broken, are killed instantly. The Captain breaks his thigh. The bone stabs out his hip, jagged and white in the lantern light. Preaching Dick's spine is reconfigured and his head cracked open and Othello's leg is shattered. The Major continues across the river in search of a surgeon and returns in time for the Captain's dying, Preaching Dick having already succumbed. The surgeon has no choice but to take Othello's leg to save his life.

Timothy Chickering is there. He is seventy years old. On my behalf, he watches them hoist Horatio from the rocks below and load him onto a sled. With eight yoke of oxen and men on ropes he's drawn to a barn above the hollow. He lingers for ten days while young boys keep him wet with buckets of water and shoo the flies away with brooms. Admission is charged to see the dying Hoaratio and when he finally dies, they skin him and sell his hide to the Boston Museum.

Horatio is something like dream and memory and imagination to my forebears. They have never seen an elephant. He is something big they take into death, something of greatness and folly entering our remembering blood.

***