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Robert Olmstead
PASTORAL "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. *** Observations. All we have to open the past and know the present are the five senses. And memory. And imagination. Place to me now (often sadly) is an element of fiction. People are characters. Conversation is dialogue. Life is a dramatic movement. Standing outside the closed circle of reality in this way makes one peculiarly immune to motivation and stimulation and needless to say, ill at ease with love in general and love of place in particular. Of course, I am desperate to know what was and what is, but primarily for the sake of my imagination. Moments fall like gems into my mind and a search for words begins. I am the constant stranger looking at the ever familiar. But as to place. We must confess: we cut our coats according to our cloth, which is to say, we only know what we know. We must painfully acknowledge that place is indifferent to us, to our existence, whether it be place natural or constructed, place primeval or synthetic, place unconquered or banal. These days it seems America is more than ever the distillate of capitalism and christianity. It seems there is no place left, no land, no landscape and there is only property. Place is sacred and yet for the right price, it can be ours. Place is, alas, a commodity, a thing bought and sold. Is it possible that all relationships in America, even those we share with nature, are commercial? Still, we persist. In place we find refuge, a soothing balm to allay the anxiety of being. This is because place is not transient, is not whimsical. It can be held like a lover, whereas life for most of us is unreliable and has a way of changing. But in finding our place do we hold too tightly, do we settle for the standard happy ending? Is surviving place a triumph of virtue and husbandry, however unsure we are of our motives and passions? Can we say that any portrait of place is ultimately the description not of place, but of the one describing? Shall I say love of place is actually love of self? Or would that be uncharitable? This is the black curve that is inside us. Name it the confusion of our feelings. We fervently wish to return to our innocence, to find our heaven on earth. Our utopian aspirations mandate a return to the Edenic garden, that we might be closer to our guiltless past. It is interesting to note that the derivation of utopia is no + place = no place. Utopia is no place. *** Tonight. I am in St. Petersburg, Russia. The miracle-working Tikhvin Virgin icon, painted by St. Luke and absent the country since WWII has arrived at the Kazan Cathedral. Thousands wait in line to pay their respects. The smell of cut grass finds my window. On the television a babushka fondly strokes the chin of her Holstein. The smell, the gesture, the barnyard, they are as familiar to me as home. Russia means beautiful and is personified as female and maternal--the motherland. When Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893 the American frontier to be closed, the Russian frontier, then as now, was limitless, shapeless and formless, simultaneously nurturing and malevolent, a frontier untamed and deeply seated in the Russian mind. The same year Turner declared the American frontier closed hundreds of thousands of settlers swarmed onto sections of land in Oklahoma and a black man in Paris, Texas was burned at the stake. The great Chicago fire killed three hundred people and in Peshtigo, Wisconsin a forest fire killed fifteen hundred and wiped out a county. The Monadnock region was already owned and settled, its hillsides denuded by sheep, its people in economic depression. Recently opened archives suggest not ten or twenty, but fifty million Russians perished during World War II and it is speculated the eastern front consumed seventy-five per cent of the German war machine. In St. Petersburg eight hundred thousand, give or take a hundred thousand, died during a nine-hundred-day siege and are interred in mass graves at Piskarevskoye and Seraphimovskoye. It is beyond imagination that these cemetery acres are more dense with human remains than earth itself. These are places sublime and beloved. Such strange words we attach to cemeteries. For New Englanders it is the anodyne air and enamelling light, the greeness that pleases our eyes. But so too is found a love of place in ruin, destruction and unreasonable sacrifice. Love and affection for place is equally found where life is a very thin ribbon. But in the end we must understand that place is not a sentient. It is incapable of requiting our love. It does not love us in the least and I cannot help but wonder how relieved the garden must have been when man was finally driven from it. I have no choice but to confess my Monadnock to be an imaginary one. So too the Connecticut River, Spofford Lake, Alumni Field, Cheshire Fair, Canoe Meadow, Horatio. They no longer exist and perhaps they never did. But wherever I go, I am there and they are with me and my relationship with them is fierce and possessive. When I die I will be the seventh generation of my mother's family buried in Westmoreland's North Cemetery, half way between the house where I grew up and Horatio crossed the river. It will be familiar ground to me as I used to play in that cemetery. When I die I will finally return home and will remain there far longer than I was ever away. I will be dead and disencumbered of all natural laws. But for now I am just a man trying to keep a boy alive. RETURN TO PAGE ONE |