A Symposium on Secret Spaces
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As part of this year's special issue of MQR devoted to "Secret Spaces of Childhood," a letter went out to authors inviting them to contribute a brief commentary to a forum on the general topic. Along with the memoirs, essays, fiction, poetry, graphic artwork, and book reviews in the double issue, this symposium is intended to help provide an iconography or conceptual map of the regions of childhood. The general commission posed to authors was the following:
The commission was not meant to be prescriptive, but suggestive, and what follows provides a striking variety of places and behaviors, in a variety of prose styles, all of the commentaries sharing the condition of being intensely memorable vignettes. From them readers can make some conclusions about the situations and spaces that need preserving and extending because of the salutary influence they exert upon the human imagination and the human spirit.
A two-line identification tag precedes each commentary: a book, or two, an institutional affiliation, an award. Most of these authors have published books directly relevant to the general topic of this issue of MQR.
Wayne Booth
A Rhetoric of Fiction
George M. Pullman Professor of English Emeritus, University of Chicago
I can remember so many secret spaces, starting about age four, that it's hard to resist doing a whole book on them. When I was six, my father died suddenly of Addison's disease, and memory says that life with my mother and my two-year-old sister was overturned in ways that no written record could reveal. Somehow from then on I led what seems to me now not just a double but a multiple life:
And so on.
When I turn from memory to my early diaries, begun at age fourteen, I don't find anything about the weeping sissy or my mother's nagging or my occasional thievery. Rather I find three sharply contrasting "Wayne C.'s" (my official name had been "Clayson" until my father, Wayne C., died). Perhaps most prominent is the would-be hero, the egoist aspiring to be honored as "at the top," in every direction. He's the one who proudly records, a year or so later, "Have been accepted for membership in the Book of the Month Club." Then there is the poverty-driven pursuer of cash, willing to work hard delivering and selling newspapers, or working for twenty-five cents an hour on a farm, proud about being able to save money by gluing rubber soles to worn-out shoes; his mother takes in less than $100 a month as an overworked elementary school teacher, and she is always short of cash (I wonder why the diary never records that he would occasionally pick her purse). Often overridding these two and all the others, there is the self revealed in frequent expressions of anguished guilt: the would-be saint, a pious, devout Mormon, struggling with an insurmountable awareness of character flaws, including self-reproach about pride and ambition (and implicit awareness of more serious misdeeds). The most striking—and most secret—moment of conflict among the diverse "Wayne C.'s" is only half-revealed in separate diary entries. The conflict was discovered, accidentally, by only two people: his mother and his newspaper boss. He began delivering newspapers shortly before starting the diary, and he soon found his boss insisting that he sell subscriptions.
That inept salesman soon got captured by the excitement of sales contests. The egoist wanted to win, to be "honored" as number one, honor being seen as reducible to whatever prize was offered.
The company gave every delivery boy a small cash gift for each subscription sold. Naturally the money-grubber self wanted to earn a lot of money, while the honors-seeker figured out that since the cash gift for each subscription was almost large enough to pay for a full month of deliveries, he could chalk up a fake subscription at very small cost. So his divided selves faced a dilemma: if he entered fake subscriptions, his chance of winning the contest went up fast, while his income went down only a small amount for each subscription. Which was more important, fame or cash income? The egoist won, hands down, and his subscription rate went up and up, finally leading to his winning a contest.
No hint there of any guilt about cheating. A few pages later he boasts that he has been chosen by the bishop (the head of the congregation) to become "the supervisor of one of the Deacon's quorums. I consider this quite an honor." Again there's no hint of any conflict between that pious achievement and what he is doing each month as he records fake subscriptions.
Suddenly the whole episode, with its fame-winning facade, crashes: he contracts Bright's disease and hears a doctor speculate about possible death. He has to turn over his routes and records to the boss, and they reveal a total jumble of dishonest subscriptions and careless juggling of data: a huge cash debt (actually quite small, as I consider it now), and incontrovertible evidence of non-existent subscriptions.
His boss turns out to be a generous man: he waits until the boy is back on his feet and attending school again, after two months at home, before he shocks the mother by revealing his discoveries. He did not turn Wayne C. in to any authorities; all he insisted on was some more work, without pay, until the losses had been paid off. Does the diary reveal the truth of any of this? Not at all. It talks as if Wayne C. were now simply working a few hours again for his old boss but in a different job. Does it confess to any guilt about it? Not at all. While confessing guilt about masturbating and about being egotistical and about being "too critical" and about "boasting too much," it never acknowledges that the crazy desire to be number one had produced an atrocious hypocrite reveling in being a winner.
I'm naturally tempted to conclude by boasting a bit (oh, yes, I still have to deal with such temptations: I hope, for example, that this account will appeal to many readers) by celebrating the boy's grappling with the very theme of this collection: secrecy, and its limits. Aware that he has many faults, and that he has revealed many faults in his diary entries, he wonders about just who should read what. In the middle of his sixteenth year, he concludes his first volume with a twelve-page confessional about his many faults, including the "sinful" fact of having "periodical sexual excretions," some of them by "violent physical agitation producing the flow of liquid." (He apparently does not yet know the word "semen.") Then he says, "I still don't know whether I should write this or not. I wish that I had a more adequate brain to be able to know what to do. . . . I cannot blame this sin on not knowing of its being a sin, because I knew it was so. . . . I have heartily repented and have tried & succeeded to keep from repeating." Which of course could not have been true. But then, still to my astonishment, he addresses directly—and in a sense honestly—the question of silence. He turns to the frontispiece of what he labels Volume I, and writes the following:
Paul Brodeur
The Stunt Man
Staff writer, The New Yorker, 1958-1996
It was the summer of 1942, and our family had made its annual migration from Boston to a rented cottage on Duxbury Beach, some forty miles south of the city. My father came down on weekends; my mother spent her days at the cottage tending my infant sister; and my brother and I, clad in bathing suits that had faded and dwindled into ragged loincloths, roamed freely from morning until night. The beach was a sandbar peninsula seven miles long, with the ocean on one side and Duxbury Bay on the other, and, except for a few summer people like us, who lived in cottages near the mainland, and some Coast Guardsmen out at Gurnet Point, it was uninhabited. A dirt road that ended at the cottage colony and a wooden bridge that rambled across the bay on piles, a mile farther along the peninsula, were the only routes of access. On Saturdays and Sundays picnickers came over the bridge and spread themselves upon the sand, but during the week the beach was deserted.
Like all boys at the seashore, my brother and I were beachcombers. We poached quahogs, collected driftwood, captured minnows trapped in tidal pools, and filled gunny sacks with pop bottles left behind by picnickers. But, above all else, we considered ourselves patriots. We salvaged tinfoil for the war effort from discarded cigarette packages, helped local residents dry sea moss to collect nitrates for munitions makers, and used the pop-bottle refunds to buy Victory stamps at the Post Office.
The war affected us in many ways that summer. There was a strict blackout every night, and when we went outside before bedtime, the unaccustomed darkness and the profound sea made us feel close and vulnerable to the conflict. Wreckage washed ashore from ships sunk by U-boats, and each day we poked through fresh piles of debris, vaguely aware that we were examining the flotsam of catastrophe. The grownups talked incessantly of a submarine that had surfaced off the shore during World War I and lobbed a few shells into the marshland behind the beach. Had the Germans been aiming at the old Cable Station? Would they try again? The speculation of our elders filled us with delicious tension. The tin cans my brother and I were forever tossing into the waves became submarines, and the rocks we threw at them depth charges, and the constant vigil we maintained for flotsam, pop bottles, and marine life took on a new dimension. For now we were patrolling a stretch of the coast—a strategic flank of the republic.
As it happened, our favorite place to play—indeed, our secret position of defense—was an abandoned duck-hunting camp that lay hidden in the dunes several miles beyond the old bridge and almost halfway out to Gurnet Point. The camp was a rambling frame-and-tarpaper affair, upon which time and the elements had wrought a deceptive camouflage. Winds and winter storms had so shifted the dunes that it was nearly buried. Foxtail and beach-plum bushes had taken root in sand covering the rooftop, and only in a hollow on the leeward side was any part of the building visible. Here my brother and I had torn away some rotted boards and fashioned an entrance.
The interior of the camp was cavernous and dank. It consisted of four rooms, three of which were half-filled with sand that had sifted down through cracks in the roof. In the largest room, there were several bunks with mildewed mattresses, a rusted iron stove, some overturned chairs, and a long table. For us, these were the furnishings of a bunker from which we operated against the foe.
A typical day found us lying on the summit of a nearby dune, waiting to ambush enemy saboteurs who were disembarking from their rubber boats. When they came into range, we unleashed a volley of shots at them from toy wooden rifles. Then we retreated to the invisible fastness of our fort and hid until they stumbled, with Teutonic stupidity, into our line of fire, giving us an opportunity to decimate them with additional volleys fired through apertures in the rotting planks. Fierce struggles took place as the last fanatic attackers breached our bastion. It was hand-to-hand for more than an hour, as we backed slowly into a corner, each forefinger a revolver that barked incessantly, firing at Nazis who were climbing through holes in the roof and dropping grotesquely dead at our feet.
On one of these days, reality intruded upon our game in the form of an explosion that sent a shower of sand upon us from the sagging roof above our heads. The beach, it turned out, was being bombed and mock-strafed by low-flying Army airplanes taking part in a training exercise being conducted by a National Guard regiment that had rumbled out across the planks of the old bridge that connected the peninsula to the mainland. The officers whom we encountered as we tried to run home seemed almost as badly frightened as we when they realized that they had failed to clear the beach properly, which is how (after being sworn to secrecy) my brother and I came to be adopted for one whole week as regimental mascots, and, to the envy of all our friends, were allowed to eat with the soldiers in their mess tent, help them dig foxholes, wave signal flags, stand inspections, and walk guard.
The saddest day of my life till then was the day my brother and I stood at attention, after the last tents had been struck and a long line of soldiers had given the beach a final policing, and watched a column of trucks and jeeps rattle back over the old wooden bridge and on to God only knows how many other beaches.
Seventeen years later, not long after I began what would become a thirty-eight-year career as a staff writer at The New Yorker, the magazine published a short story of mine entitled "A War Story." It was a first-person account of the events of the summer I have just described, and it began with a sentence that reads, "This is one of those stories that, for reasons of honor, have had to be suppressed."
That wasn't true, of course, but merely a literary conceit to explain tongue in cheek why I hadn't written the story before. At the time—it was 1959—I had no idea that I would spend most of my tenure at The New Yorker unraveling the dark secrets of the manufacturers of asbestos products, and those of other captains of industry, who were inflicting disease upon their workers and poisoning the land, as well as those of government officials, who fostered the climate of secrecy that cloaked so much of our national life during the Cold War.
It may be revealing that in a 1997 memoir, Secrets: A Writer in the Cold War, which gives an account of my experiences as an investigative journalist, I include a few sentences about the adventure that befell my brother and me on Duxbury Beach in the summer of 1942, and a longer section about a family secret that my parents kept from me. Having been sworn to secrecy about what had happened on the beach by officers of the National Guard regiment, we never breathed a word of it to our parents. Nor did they ever tell me about my father's previous marriage and a half brother to whom I had been given almost the same name, even though I must have suspected something about it and him at an early age.
Like everyone else, I have been touched as a child by secrets.
Today, a pair of carved decoys from the old duck hunting camp sit on a shelf in the living room of my home on Cape Cod. They remind me of the secret place in which my brother and I waged our fantasy war, of how lucky we were to have been so young, and of the power of secrets kept and those revealed.
Frederick Buechner
A Long Day's Dying
The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found
I can think of two "secret spaces" which, looking back, I recognize were really one and the same. When I was a small child my family spent summers in Quogue, Long Island, and on the beach there; especially toward the end of the afternoon when the sun was starting to think about setting, I would lay a beach umbrella down on its side and lie curled up in the shelter of it with a wonderful feeling of snugness, safety, warmth, as the chill sea breeze whipped the sand around the edges of the ribbed canvas. After my father's death in 1936, when I was ten, we lived for a couple of years in Bermuda, where our pink house, The Moorings, was directly on the harbor across from Hamilton. When it rained, I loved to sit outside on the lawn in a canvas deck chair with a blanket of some sort draped over the sunshade to keep me snug, safe, dry, as I watched the downpour advance in sheets across the grey water and listened to its drumming above my head. To this day, age seventy-three, I can still conjure up in much of its original richness—especially at night in bed—what it felt like to experience both the wildness, wetness, windiness of things, and at the same time my utter protection from it.
Peggy Ellsberg
The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Senior Lecturer in English, Barnard College
In the final daylight hours of the last century, with no particular plans for celebrating New Year's Eve, I went to a Victorian dollhouse museum in Santa Monica called Angels' Attic. I brought with me my daughters, Catherine and Nini, ages seven and five, dressed in matching red pinafores. The two other people in the museum mistook them for twins. I have grown accustomed to the pleasure observers take in spotting twins, like the brief thrill of sighting a rare bird. "Yes, twins," I lied, not wanting to disappoint anyone.
Like a snow owl or a set of small twins, a scale model or even something simply small—an electric locomotive train, a mocked-up cathedral, a hummingbird's tiny nest, a marshmallow peep yellow chicken in a basket—all rehearse for some grander but somehow diminished version of themselves. And replicas of homes, in particular, are especially pleasing. Creating altars dedicated to food and eating and coziness and sleeping in dollhouses strangely affirms what we do in our real homes. Entering the metonymic world of the dollhouse, we sense ourselves hidden and protected, empowered with a control that in real life escapes us. The message the miniature delivers contains both depth and delight.
Released into the exhibit at Angels' Attic, Catherine pressed herself close to the plexiglass covering an ingenious curiosity, a larger-than-a-seven-year-old-child-sized model of the Woman with So Many Children Who Lived in a Shoe. Frozen in time and receptive to poetic projection, like the figures on John Keats's Grecian urn, doll children spilled out of every room and over the thumb-sized furniture. Catherine wanted no one to bother her. She whispered to the harried mini-mother who, surrounded by a handful of doll children, slaved over a cook stove. Nini meanwhile stepped up on a bench and studied an exceptionally intricate workshop and dormitory for thimble-sized Christmas elves, themselves miniatures within the miniature. Nini, too, her cheek pressed to the plexiglass, began to whisper, answering secret questions. Immersed in their identical experiences of deep looking, I too stood there, gazing at them gazing at interior versions of interiors. Like receding mirrors or Chinese boxes, the miniature students of miniatures in the little Victorian museum absorbed by even littler museums embodied for me the muse of museums.
When I was six, I received a pink and grey tin dollhouse. It was nothing like a museum-quality dollhouse, Queen Mary's electrified plaything at Windsor Court, for example, not like the opulent mimicries of the haute bourgeois domestic environments available on E-bay or in the Nutshell News. Mine was an undecorated bread-box of a house, a 1950s Sears pre-fab. One just like it, plain as a potato, recently appeared on the Antiques Road Show with a price tag of $2000. In 1956, I furnished my tin house with pinecones and round stones and tables made of bottle caps and bobbie pins. I built altars into every room; some cotton batting served as bedding for a capped acorn, my she-baby. I was practicing for something. Kneeling in front of it, I entered a secret museum.
Plato says in his Laws that "the man who is to make a good builder must play at building toy houses, and to make a good farmer, he must play at tilling land." I realized, as Angels' Attic was closing, that my children were entering the psychic homes, practicing for a future of indwelling. But the museum really was closing. In a few hours it would be Y2K and outside the twilit streets were filling up with noise and adult visions of glitter and champagne.
"Are you sure they're twins?" asked the kindly lady, eager to lock up and go home. "What a question!" I answered, stalling. Persuading the girls to leave took some strategy, but actually, there was also a twin wonder outside, a double rainbow arching into the blue-grey sky. And as the girls looked up their faces were lit from within by a secret. One for each.
Noël Riley Fitch
Biographies of Sylvia Beach, Julia Child, Anaïs Nin
Teaches at USC and American University of Paris
A formal prayer, its denouement always blessing "the hands" that had prepared the overdone roast beef, was followed by formal conversation at our Sunday afternoon dinners. Social decorum reigned for the three Riley girls. When for once no one was looking in my direction and the family discussion picked up at the end of the meal, I would slide silently off the front edge of the chair, pass carefully under the tablecloth without disturbing it, and settle beneath the center of the family dining-room table. The conversation continued up there, but I knew I was safely on my "Moonie."
The legs of my two sisters and parents, and occasionally those of visiting dignitaries, were draped with the generous linen tablecloth and surrounded my secret space—protecting me. I was in a private and magical spot. No eyes. No prayers, challenges, or decisions. In charge of my own domain. Sitting with a grin on my face, I was secure in my cave, imaginatively holding my secret surprise.
A Moonie was what those couples went on after my father, The Right Reverend Dr. John Riley, married them and they walked up the aisle and out of the church. We had heard whispered talk of "honeymoons" for years and understood them to be secret and private places. No prying eyes. My innocent imagination wanted such a space for myself.
When I was older and had stopped my flights underground, my little sister began taking her own Moonie. Now we would playfully call out "where is Gail?" "Where has Gail gone?" But, unlike me, she could not contain her giggles and crawled out to confess that she had been on her Moonie. She never could keep a secret, never seemed to need one. By then I had accepted the truth that my secret place had been discovered. My escapes had always been observed. At any time my cave could have been invaded, though it never was.
Today, placemats have replaced long linen tablecloths, and there are few secrets. I have been married twice, and after each ceremony I did not, for one reason or another, take a honeymoon. But I remember the innocence and excitement, the warm semi-darkness of my childhood Moonies. What has remained of my childhood Moonie is a sense of being in control of my own privacy and a need for having a room of my own. I grasped this truth under the family table long before reading Virginia Woolf. Montaigne was right in comparing life to a shop, in which the keeper needs a "back room."
I need my own study and, preferably, my own toilet. My husband, who stirs humor into every secret place of my life, likes to raise my toilet seat to show he has invaded my space.
More important than this exaggerated sense of space is another lesson I learned in the public scrutiny of busy parsonage life: I learned to savor the pleasure of my own company. As a biographer I spend months, indeed years, at the table of communal history, interviewing persons and travelling to distant libraries. But when the full-time writing begins, I slip under the public cloth to give myself over to my own company and the solitary battle with facts and words. Indeed, I spend my time invading other peoples' secret places.
Mark Jonathan Harris
Academy Award-winning filmmaker
Professor of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California
When I was a child novels gave me the chance to participate in a wider, less circumscribed world than my own, one in which others shared my own fears and resentments, my desires and my unhappiness. I could cry over the death of Dora in David Copperfield, exult in the rebellion of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, relish the revenge of the Count of Monte Cristo. Reading helped assuage the loneliness I felt growing up, reassured me that I was not as strange or bad a person as I secretly feared.
By high school the authors I read had completely changed—Twain giving way to Salinger, Dickens to Lawrence, Dumas to Hemingway—but books continued to be a refuge for me, a place where I felt safe to explore roles and emotions I wouldn't consider elsewhere. When I got to Harvard, it seemed natural to major in English, but after only a few months of Humanities 6, I developed a fierce and implacable hatred for the so-called New Criticism. I didn't want to deconstruct the imaginary worlds in which I had spent so much of my emotional energy. I wanted to believe in their reality. Like certain emotions in my family, novels were best left unexamined. I still read them as religiously as before—I discovered Russian literature at Harvard—but most of the fiction I read was for myself rather than for classes. Books were still a private retreat, a hideaway I could visit whenever I needed, where I could respond more freely and openly than I often did with other people.
Perhaps because so much of my emotional experience came from books, after college I sought a job that would provide me more direct contact with life. I found one as a crime reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago. The South Side police beat, from five in the evening until two in the morning, was a different world from any I had ever encountered. All the passions that were repressed or hidden in the sheltered community in which I had been raised exploded every night on the South Side. I would read the crimes on the teletype, diligently gather the facts from the police who investigated them, but found it very difficult to understand or identify with the stories I was reporting. After the first few weeks of hanging out at South Side police stations, I started bringing a book to work each night. For months I carried Crime andPunishment around with me the way the cops carried their riot gear, as a shield against the violence, the brutality, the senselessness I was encountering. For a long time Raskolnikov was far more real than any of the people I wrote about.
Daily immersion in violence cannot help but alter you. Often it hardens people, but in my case it pierced the bookish armor I had used to defend myself against the harsher emotions of life. After several months I was transferred to days and assigned to Family Court. I found the stories I covered—most of which never made the papers—heartbreaking. Day after day I watched children brutalized by poverty, neglect, abuse. Their pain and anguish began to affect me as strongly as the characters I read about.
In time print journalism led me to documentary filmmaking. In retrospect it's easy to see the unconscious attractions of this medium. The camera served as my new Crime and Punishment, providing me both access to strong emotional experiences and distance from them. As a filmmaker I could participate directly rather than vicariously in important social and political events, but, at the same time, I had the luxury of the editing room to process and interpret my experiences and to form judgments about them.
In my late thirties, although I continued making documentary films, I also started writing children's books—for some of the same reasons I think parents have children—to get a second chance to experience what I had missed in childhood (like throwing a full-blown, dish-breaking tantrum) or to redeem earlier failures and humiliations (finally standing up to the school bully). Writing books from a child's perspective gave me the opportunity to explore the world in a way I had been too emotionally constrained and restricted to do when I was young.
In the last year my work as a filmmaker, my interest in children, and my own history have all converged in a documentary I have written and directed about the Kindertransports. In the nine months from December 1938 until Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain rescued over 10,000 children, 90% of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Into the Arms of Strang ers (Fall 2000) chronicles the dramatic stories of these children, who were forced to give up their families, homes, even language, as they fled Nazi persecution to England.
Although the pains of my childhood do not begin to approach the traumas these children faced, I strongly identified with them—particularly the loneliness of these refugees living in other people's houses, in a foreign land where they did not speak the language and whose country was at war with their own. In researching and filming their story, I have been asking the Kinder, as they call themselves, a question central to my own childhood: In your unhappiness, where did you turn for solace? To my surprise, for many it was books.
One man, who came to England from Vienna as a seven-year-old, and who constantly feared being sent back if he upset his foster parents, remembers two favorite places in their home—one under the grand piano and the other in front of the open hearth coal fire, where he could spread out his books and comics and read "for hours on end." Always on his guard, desperate not to offend, he loved adventure stories most of all, stories where heroes could act boldly and decisively and never worry about the consequences.
Another woman, an avid reader as a young girl, turned to books for relief from the isolation and segregation she suffered as a Jew in Nazi Germany. When her parents decided to send her to England at the age of fifteen, what grieved her most was abandoning her collection of books. "I couldn't bear to leave them behind," she remembers. "I just burned them in the oven. It was wintertime. We had an old-fashioned oven that you fed with coal, and I fed my books into it, one by one."
When she arrived at the foster family in Coventry that offered her a home, her first shock was the absence of books. "It was absolutely traumatic. Can you imagine a house without one book in it? Nothing. Nothing to read. Nothing to learn English from." Her second shock was that the family had taken her in to be a maid for them and wouldn't allow her to continue school.
In making this film, I have been touched by the often desperate loneliness of these refugee children but also by the resilience and courage that sustained them through their trials in Britain, where, as Eva Figes writes, "the fact that I had arrived as a foreign child was never forgotten or forgiven, and with the rise of anti-German feeling after the outbreak of war my nationality was always good for abuse."
For Figes, too, books played a critical role in her ability to survive her uprooting. "Real books, that was perhaps the most important of many discoveries," she writes in Little Eden, a wonderful memoir about her wartime sojourn at an unconventional boarding school in a country town in Gloucester. A corollary of this discovery was the realization of her need for separateness, a place where she could be alone—to read, to think: "Perhaps it was because, even as a very small child, I had been conscious of a secret, solitary nucleus inside which nobody could reach. It held pain, but also dreams, and I needed to be withdrawn to allow it to grow."
The hiding place she chose for retreat, "where I would bolt myself in when I wanted to get away from everybody and everything," was the basement lavatory, cold and damp on winter mornings, but the one place she could brood undisturbed, work through her miseries and loneliness, let slip the mask she wore with other children. "By now I had begun to understand that my life involved playing a role, in the dormitory, in the classroom, even at play. It was necessary to appear happy, cheerful and integrated within the group, and in a situation where one was eating, sleeping, working and playing together it was necessary to find a bolt hole in order to give way to one's inner feelings."
For many children books continue to provide this bolt hole, allowing them to shut the door, however briefly, on the pain and confusion of their lives, and open a window into a world of dreams, of fantasy, of hope. If books can sustain children during the upheavals of wartime, as they did me under different circumstances, surely they can still be meaningful, even to today's Nintendo generation. Television, movies, internet chat rooms also offer children a chance to explore other roles and lifestyles, to expand their vision of themselves, but the experiences these media provide are essentially communal, rather than private. Books provide a private psychic space—the core of any secret hideaway—a haven where you are free to feel, to think, to imagine, and to dream.
Jim Harrison
The Road Home
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
As a poet and novelist I've grown rather inured to my own peculiarities but have long openly accepted my penchant for secret places, mostly thickets, that I depend on almost daily for solace. I can think of specific locations in Michigan, including the Upper Peninsula, but also in Arizona and New Mexico, a single place in New York City, one in Paris, and another near a friend's house down in western Burgundy.
The original, the ur-thicket, was near the porch of our childhood home in a dense collection of shrubs. I often retreated there for hours with my dog after I was blinded in one eye by a playmate. Soon after this accident (intentional) I also lost the dog because she was over-defensive but kept the thicket for years.
The prerequisite of a first-rate thicket is that you can see out but it is unlikely indeed that you'll be noticed by others. It is helpful to have a dog with me, even if it is a friend's dog, which is the case in Burgundy. Birds often visit. Once in a prized thicket in Arizona during a violent rainsquall I shared my thicket with dozens of rare vermilion flycatchers. They treated me as an equal.
I don't care for the idea of bullfighting but there is a Spanish word, "querencia," which refers to the place in the ring a particular bull feels the strongest, most at home, most able to deal with his impending doom. I'm sure that my thickets offer me peace in a life that is permanently inconsolable but reasonably vital and productive. Thickets quickly draw off the poison. After a few minutes of sitting you hear your own tentative heartbeat. What people clumsily call the "inner child" gracefully rises to the surface without much coaxing. Your normally watchful dog takes a snooze and occasionally you doze off yourself within these few yards of earth where you feel no dislocation and are totally at home.
Jerry Herron
AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History
Professor of English, Wayne State University
I used to think about the room where I learned to read, for no better reason than it seemed to belong just to me, the way childhood things always do, when we grow up, with the portrait of George Washington, and the cheap, nylon flag, "I pledge allegiance . . ." each morning first thing, hand over heart, staring at the alphabet taped across the top of the blackboard (that really was black not green). And the radiators that when you'd put a Crayola on them, the hot wax would melt down and pool on the hard wood floor that creaked each step you took across it, and how that smell became the smell I always thought about first when I thought about the first day of school with the scents of pencil shavings and paper and paste made of wheat that if you wanted to you could eat it. (Bobbie Bentley did.)
And the cloak room in back, with doors you could close from inside, so all you could see were the patterns of light across your shoes that came through the air holes at the bottom, and how that's where the teacher would find William, balled up in a nest of coats, his face smeared with tears because he always got upset when we practiced writing in our Big Chief tablets with the cigar-fat pencils and he would make mistakes and when he tried to erase he would tear the page and start to cry with snot running down his lip and when his parents came home from their trip they found out his grandmother who they had left in charge had just gotten tired of him one day and decided she'd enroll him in first grade even though he was only three and a half, big for his age probably, so they came to take him home. And we all felt sad not because we would miss William, since none of us had really talked to him, but because we knew that nobody was going to find out a secret about us that would set us free.
I decided to look for the room where I learned to read, back for a visit, when I was forty and got stopped by a guard who made me wait until a teacher could come and hear what I wanted who was—the teacher—young enough to be my daughter, if I had one, but not beautiful like Miss Creer, my teacher, had been when I learned to read, in the Bluebird group (we were the best), and the young woman listened almost patiently and said sure take a look around, which I did, not being certain what room it was, but pretending I knew, they all looked the same now so what difference did it make, with the giant windows blocked out except for little gun slits at the bottom, and the ceiling dropped, with fluorescent lights and the cloak rooms gone where nobody would ever get to see how Kathy McNaren didn't have a belly button because it had been surgically removed and she would show you if you asked (even if you didn't). I wish I'd asked her why. And a little boy was sitting in the dark with the lights turned off so he could see the computer screen better and he looked up at me with the blue glow reflecting off his glasses so his eyes disappeared, like I was an intruder, which I was, bothering him while he was working, after school. Learning to read. Will he remember this room as if it had belonged just to him?I hope not.
Paul Karlstrom
On the Edge of America:California Modernist Art, 1900-1920
West Coast Regional Director of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art
Image-making is fundamental to the journey of self-discovery. Writing and illustrating my own stories played an important role in my childhood. Having an imaginary world that I could populate and control as I wished was reassuring and helped me better understand the larger world in which I was obliged to operate. No doubt my own professional life, including studying and writing about images as cultural documents, began then. Art and image-making arise out of a fundamental human need to bring order to a difficult and often unpredictable reality. Recently I was inspired to look again at these childhood creative efforts carefully preserved by my mother. And as I studied them I understood for perhaps the first time their true meaning in my life: the creation of a world that helped me find personal continuity in a somewhat dislocated childhood characterized by the insecurity of frequent moves. Art provided a means, one that I deployed constantly (as evidenced by the number of early picture stories that remain), to enter a refuge of my own imaginative devising, a place to repair to after experiencing rebuffs (actual or perceived) in my efforts to make friends in a series of new neighborhoods and schools. It even provided an outlet for early teenage fantasies associated with the discomforting but thoroughly irresistible stirrings of sexual awareness. I learned at an early age that you could have at least some of what you long for by creating images with pencil, pen, and watercolor.
The thinking and understanding that goes into creating pictures may well provide a sense of at least a degree of control (the term "agency" is often used to describe this phenomenon) of one's world. As I drew my own self-portrait with my young colleagues at the Learning Center, I realized the advantage they had in being less self-conscious about art than adults are. The process that the children have embarked upon at the Learning Center is something akin to discovering oneself in an invented "secret space" and drawing from it the courage to step out and engage the world as more self-aware individuals. My own practice continues in the personal realm as I craft collages that are basically visual manifestations of my interior life. Slowly these personal and frequently quite revealing images are entering into a more public realm, either as gifts to friends and sympathetic associates or, more recently, in artist-organized "underground" exhibitions. It occurs to me that as I share these small pictorial "confessions" with an audience, however limited, I am acknowledging who I am as an individual or at least how I understand myself.
As a grownup I find myself an employee of the Smithsonian Institution, directing the West Coast activities of the Archives of American Art. In that capacity it has been my charge to locate and acquire for the national collections letters, photographs, diaries, and related historical documents. The focus of the Archives has been preservation of historic records for use by scholars and writers, a "high end" educational constituency. However, the official Smithsonian motto is the "increase and diffusion of knowledge." Broadly interpreted, this would seem to encompass the purposes and goals of the California Living Histories project. And it seems most appropriate for us to pay attention to the young people who may well grow up to use our scholarly collections. But far more important, it seems to me, is to be involved in the seeking of (self) knowledge, the ultimate humanist goal and reason for studying history in the first place. And it further occurs to me that many of the more personal documents (the intimate letter or personal sketchbook, for example) I collect for study by historians are, when all is said and done, nothing other than adult versions of what children—myself or those at the Leaning Center—have carried back from individual "secret spaces." I suspect that we never outgrow the need for and ability to learn from these comforting and refreshing alternative worlds of our own imaginative invention.
Nan Knighton
Book and lyrics for the musical The Scarlet Pimpernel (Tony nomination)
Stage adaptation for Saturday Night Fever
I suppose I was afraid all the time. I remember living in a constantly vibrant state, jangling inside, ever-vigilant, looking over my shoulder. I didn't talk about my fears to anyone—children usually don't. I lived in a leafy neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, and my life, by any standards, was idyllic. From ages five to nine, I appear in each photograph as a smiling child with golden curls. But I look back on these years and see quite clearly that the pulse of my every day was fear.
Fear of what? Well, you could make your list. Here's a partial list of mine: 1) Mrs. Bellows, across the street, was referred to as "the crazy woman" and my friends and I would dare each other to run up on her lawn. Invariably, she came hurtling out of the house in a nightgown, screaming at us that we were terrible children and were going straight to Hell. We'd tear away, breathless, just as her nurse emerged to yank her back inside. 2) A friend of my brother's died when his sled hit a metal pole sticking out of the snow. 3) My friend Sally drowned at age seven when her parents were foolish enough to go boating on the Chesapeake Bay during a storm. 4) Catherine, the lady who lived next door and was a surrogate grandmother to me, had a husband who was a doctor, a man with no patience for children. One day when I was touching some of his prized glass figurines, the doctor slapped me across the face. In order to retain diplomatic relations with the neighbors, my parents did not confront the doctor about this incident—it was glossed over and dropped. 5) Catherine died a year later. She drowned in the bathtub. People said it was an accident. I overheard my parents whisper that it might be "suicide." (When I was a teenager, my father confided his belief that the doctor had murdered Catherine.) 6) My brother told me he belonged to a club of eagles. He hinted they might let me join the club. The eagles would come to my window every night, he said, and watch me. If I moved even an inch, they would fly in and kill me. I was five years old. How many nights did I lie paralyzed, sweating and terrified? 7) When my brother was eleven and I was eight, he suffered an anomalous stroke and lay in a coma for two days. For me, the worst part was being alone in the house with him when he first collapsed, stumbling through the neighborhood to get help, hearing the howl of the ambulance. And then my mother came home and shook my shoulders, screaming at me, "What happened? What happened?!"
Those were some of my terrors, but every child has them—bedtime illusions of creatures perched in the dark on that corner chair, nightmares of monsters, fears of kidnapping, abandonment, or that great mystery—death. And, of course, the unluckiest children deal directly with abuse. In a way, fear is the biggest revelation of childhood, the worst surprise: "Oh. Bad things do happen." And yet somehow it's kept secret. It's all held tight to the chest. Why don't children talk about it? Wouldn't it be infinitely logical for a child to go to her parents and say, "I'm a wreck. I think eagles are going to peck my eyes out and the crazy lady across the street is going to eat me alive and how the hell could you let that doctor slap me?" Why do children keep their fears secret? Are they trying to be little adults, imitating their apparently stoic parents? Are they doubly afraid to disclose the horror lest somehow they are at fault? One thing I do know is that children have an amazing ability to dissociate, to simply block it all out. ("Hmm. My friend just drowned. Guess I'll go out and jump rope. Now I'm jumping rope. I'm fine.") Maybe the only way a child can cope with the newly discovered terrors of the world is simply to disable them and substitute a preferred reality. In my case, I wrote. I taught myself to read and write at the kitchen table. I did it regularly and assiduously, with a child's picture dictionary beside me, copying words, sounding them out. I think when I wrote, I must have entered a safe zone.
In this poem, life's about as rotten as it gets, but there's that happy ending. As I read through the folders of my old stories and poems, over and over the little girls or boys I created were surrounded with horrendous dangers and sorrows, but I always made them end up "happily ever after." I suppose part of this may have been a by-product of growing up in the 50s, but my gut feeling is that happy endings simply quelled my fears. If I wrote them, then, on some level of reality, they existed. Following is something I wrote at age nine. I have no idea what it is, but I copy it here exactly:
And terrors dissolve, over and over. Perhaps the core of fear is helplessness: something awful stands in my doorway and I can't do a damn thing about it. A child has to do something about it, and I think writing made me strong, gave me armor. As a little girl, I would acknowledge that scary, jangling world out there and then proceed to surmount it. With a pencil and paper, I could call the shots, I could make justice prevail. Fear may be a secret space where children dwell, but in order to survive, don't all children create an ancillary secret space for mastering that fear? Lord, there are a million scary things out there, all quite real—a child could spend 24 hours a day trembling with that discovery. Or he could find a safe zone, a space where he's got the power. It's like a key clicking in a lock, a silent voice whispering, "This is you. This is your territory. This is how you take command." I found it with writing. Other children build complex Legos, or play basketball or paint or ice skate, tell jokes, play the piano. (And, of course, today there are the inevitable computer games, where God knows it's easy enough to pulverize the bad guys). Ideally, though, a child finds a space where his or her unique gift reigns and empowers: suddenly your head's high, you've found your niche, that thing that makes you the cowboy on his horse, the soldier planting his flag at the top of the hill. The happy secret space is the one where you're in charge.
Today I write for a living. The Scarlet Pimpernel, a musical for which I wrote book and lyrics, opened on Broadway in the Fall of 1997. And, oh yes, TheScarlet Pimpernel has a classic happy ending where good triumphs, the villain is foiled, and the hero and heroine quite literally sail off into the sunset. Am I still then just a child smacking back the danger? Recently I was sent a copy of a letter from the Scarlet Pimpernel website. The letter was from one Pimpernel fan to another, and the last line read, "Remember—the good guy always wins in the end!" Not only am I still insisting on the happy endings, but apparently lots of other adults out there are still needing them. Those secret spaces of childhood never really go away. We just tend to tackle them with a bit more sophistication.
As I write this, I'm in Arizona on a ranch. There is much about this place that is "a secret space." I came here by myself for a week's vacation. I'm about to go into a dining room full of families and couples where I won't know a soul. I ride horses every day. Their hooves stumble on the rocks, and the wranglers warn us how easily a horse can spook and buck. When I lope, it's a challenge to stay in the saddle. I've now heard several anecdotes about the bite of the Black Widow spider, and how you should shake your boots out each morning. Believe me, in the mornings I am shaking out every stitch of clothing I own. I also listen carefully to the snake instructions, "Ya meet a rattlesnake on the path, ya just back up, reeeal slow. . . ." All of this is very very very very scary. And I sit here, looking out on the desert, writing.
Philip Levine
The Simple Truth (Pulitzer Prize, 1995)
Professor of English, New York University
*Alberti died shortly after this commentary was composed—Ed.
Rafael Alberti, for me the greatest living poet,* tells us in his memoir of a secret grove in which he could with perfect ease become the person no one else saw, the amazingly imaginative child we now know as Rafael Alberti. No Jesuit priest ever entered the grove, nor did those pious aunts and uncles who savaged his childhood, nor did his parents or his brothers and sisters, nor even the "real authority figure in those days," the family servant, Paca Moy. He calls it his "lost grove" because when he was fifteen he left it behind forever, along with his dog Centella with whom he had shared those childhood years and those places of refuge. For financial reasons the family was forced to leave the small town of Puerto de Santa Maria at the mouth of "the River of Forgetfulness" overlooking the Gulf of Cadiz and move to a small, dark apartment near the Atocha station in Madrid. When I was thirteen my family also made a dramatic move. We had been living in the center of Detroit—then a city of two million souls, as Alberti would put it; my mother, who had for years harbored the desire to own her own home, seized the opportunity to purchase an inexpensive house on the still undeveloped outskirts of the city. Within a few months I too found a secret grove which soon became the heart of my childhood. It was, of course, not Alberti's grove, and yet in one central way it was, for like his grove it represented peace and gave me the privacy I needed to conduct my secret conversations with the known and unknown worlds and with myself. If I were this moment suddenly transported to Detroit I could lead you to the very spot, but I would not. I am sure the gigantic copper beech that was its exact center is no longer there, nor are the clustered maples and elms, nor is the thick underbrush, the heaped leaves, and the gnarled fallen trunks of dead trees. I'm sure everything has been replaced by a row of small, modest, lower-middle class homes with tended lawns and fenced yards, homes very much like ours. Could a living child find his or her secret heart in what is there now? Perhaps in an attic room or behind the furnace in the basement or in a dry fruit cellar, its windows papered over. Children are both resourceful and driven, and each requires a secret place of contemplation and invention. I tried those places before I found my grove, before it became the site of my first poems and largely the subject of those poems. Although I'm known largely as an urban poet, one obsessed with the cities I've called home—Detroit, Barcelona, New York—in my early poems I addressed the natural world certain that the natural world was waiting to hear me. At thirteen I sang to the listening stars, the unseen wind, the trees that caught the wind and turned it to music, the rain, and especially the rich perfumes of the earth that received the rain. There in the secret heart of childhood—seemingly isolated and lonely—my words commanded the largest and most extraordinary audience they would ever delight: the whole of creation.
William Meezan
Marion Elizabeth Blue Professor of Children and Families, University of Michigan School of Social Work
Outstanding Research Award, Society for Social Work and Research
Most people think of children's secret spaces as safe sanctuaries—places to get away from the stress of childhood. But for some children, being alone in a secluded space is lonely, scary and unsafe. They are gay and lesbian children who are confused and feel isolated. They are children who have been abused or demeaned in other ways by their parents, and have had their sense of self scarred. They are children of color or of unusual heritages who have not been taught pride. Because they have internalized negative images, these children don't like themselves and are therefore denied the ability to enjoy solitude.
I was such a child. Being alone, even for short periods of time, was frightening. Being alone meant living with my demons that told me I didn't belong, that I was less worthy, and that I was damaged. It was not just that I was different—that could be celebrated. It was that I was bad, or at least that's what I thought then. My demons made me agitated and hyperactive, secretive in the presence of adults for fear of being "discovered," hypersensitive, and easily brought to tears when criticized for the most minimal indiscretions. They made me afraid of being alone.
And so, safe places—my secret places during childhood—were public spaces. They were places where demons could not come out, or at least where I could control them. They were places where activities were organized and supervised, environments where group activities were structured, where I could be engaged with others and not with myself—Scouts, summer camp, and Hebrew day school—places where I could fit in, or at least pretend to fit in. Because they provided a sense of normalcy, I remained in the Scouts until the troop dissolved, attended day school until after my Bar Mitzvah, and went to summer camp, in one role or another, until I began graduate school.
High school—a "special" public school in Manhattan called the High School of Music and Art—gave me ways not just to contain the demons but to accept them, which was a first step toward conquering them. I got to go there not because I was a brilliant musician but because I was born with a musical ear. Going to M&A meant I had to leave the Bronx, which opened new geographic, experiential, and interpersonal vistas. My classmates were rich and poor, white and non-white, worldly and sheltered, conservative and radical, troubled and undisturbed, fun and somber. Each was unique, and what bound us together were our various talents and shared interests, not our backgrounds. And, because we were talented, we were respected by our teachers and treated with dignity. We were told we were worthy, and because I began to feel worthy being alone became less frightening.
In high school I also discovered that I could be protected by music, and learned that I could be happy and alone simultaneously. I realized this when, as part of an assignment, I had to listen to the Bach Mass in B minor. When I put it on my phonograph, my parents were appalled—nice Jewish boys didn't listen to church music or for that matter any choral music written in Latin or German. I was told to close the door to my room so the "noise" wouldn't penetrate the house. At that moment, something amazing happened. The great choruses of Bach simultaneously enthralled and protected me. From that day on, when I needed to feel safe, I shut myself away with Bach or Haydn or Handel or Mozart or Beethoven or Wagner—not their symphonies (unless they had choral movements) but their masses and their oratorios, their requiems and their cantatas, and later, their operas. And just to make sure I would be safe, I developed a love of Gregorian chant.
In college I learned to combine my two secret places. The fraternity house, the public space, meant I did not have to be alone when I did not want to be, and music (some of which I now owned) kept people out of my room when I wanted to be alone. I didn't study much, for that meant being alone and vulnerable. But it was here that I decided, very late in my college career (and having almost flunked out), that my calling was to work with troubled children, something that I knew I could be good at because of my various experiences. As I entered Social Work graduate school, learning became meaningful for the first time, for I had no wish to do harm to those I wanted to help. Not surprisingly, I started to do well academically.
My first job after graduate school was in a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed latency-aged boys. I loved that work until the system got in the way. It all happened around a child named Luis, an eight-year-old who had been abandoned to the streets of New York at the age of six and had managed to live on his own for a year before coming to the treatment center. A charming child, he had survival skills but little educational or emotional resources. His projective tests said he was deeply troubled.
Over the next eighteen months his progress was nothing short of amazing. He endeared himself to a volunteer who applied to become his foster parent. While his discharge at this point may have been slightly premature, I pushed for it fearing he was becoming "institutionalized." The cottage parents were against it because he was not yet "neat" and the psychiatrist speculated that he still needed structure. So, despite what his teacher, the psychologist, the consultant, and I said, they decided that he should stay another year. I knew this was a disastrous decision (I learned after leaving that within five months he had been psychiatrically hospitalized after being physically and sexually brutalized by older children in the institution; Lord knows what happened to him after that), and vowed that I was going to work to change systems that destroyed children like him.
Wounded and battered by an uncaring bureaucracy, and feeling helpless again, I turned to the one place that gave me solace and rewards. Doctoral education allowed me to concentrate on learning what had become my passion—damaged children and what it takes to make them whole. The freedom of doctoral education gave me another truly private, secret space, where I felt complete and competent: a cubicle (now an office) where all of my energies could be devoted to learning and writing about kids and their families and what we need to do to support them.
And so, I have come to consider academic institutions my "secret space." So watch out for college professors wearing maroon and baby-blue sweat shirts, who have spent 21 years partnered to a church musician, walk on campus singing Handel oratorios, and stop to smile at children who don't seem to belong. They may be in a space as private as a tree house or a fort made out of an old cardboard box. And be equally aware of those who write in silence about something they are passionate about, for their offices may hold secrets few people understand.
Valerie Miner
Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews, and Reportage
Professor of English, University of Minnesota
1955/New Jersey
She is gone. Off with Lily or Gerry or someone who has a car. Grandma is taking care of us, or we are taking care of her. It's fine. I am eight years old already and I understand.
My brothers watch cartoons. Grandma is cooking. I am playing dress-up in Mom's bedroom. It's really my parents' bedroom, but when Daddy is at sea, it becomes her bedroom. A big, light, airy place at the back of the house, separated by a floor from the upstairs bedrooms. It's not a very private room and I feel easy about entering while she's gone. I do close the door because I'll be changing clothes.
First I try on the hats, those close-fitting, feathered hats. Mom has two—yellow and green. The green looks better with my eyes and skin. Then I put on one of her fancy slips and suddenly I am draped in a luxurious ballgown. These satin and lace slips are so pretty, I wish my mother would wear them out—to the theatre or a night club—but Mom doesn't go out. And in the bottom drawer, that fabric Dad sent from Argentina, as if he forgot she couldn't sew. The bright blue and red and green—same color as the hatis a little scratchy, but it will work handsomely as a shawl. Now a pair of red shoes from the closet.
There, I stand admiring myself in her mirror and seeing—as I look closely—myself reflected a hundred times (although I stop counting after five) in my father's mirror on the taller bureau across the room. This double reflection is dizzying, so I try to ignore it, concentrating on the angle of my hat and a detail in the lace bodice. Closer, I lean into her mirror.
Minutes pass. I must wait for the right moment. Finally, the cameras start rolling. Local stations across the country have tuned in and I modestly introduce myself. Valerie Miner, child star, here to testify to the beauty aid of Ivory Soap. It really is 99 and 44/100 percent pure. So pure it floats.
On Tuesdays I endorse Pond's Cold Cream.
John Hanson Mitchell
Trespassing
The 2000 New England Booksellers' Association Award for a body of work
The place, even at this distance in time, looms as a metaphor, a half-remembered country of ruined estates, with canted terraces, broken balustrades and toppled pillars, and the whole of it overgrown with greeny, twisting vines.
There was once money in the town in which I grew up, but by my time all the old families had grown eccentric and were living out their days on dwindling trust funds. Some became collectors of birds' eggs, some kept donkeys in the old estate carriage houses and quoted Spencerian couplets to them at night. Some were totally undone by the Depression and walked off the cliffs that ran along the west bank of the Hudson River. The land here was in decline, it was a nation of decaying gardens, huge trees, brick walls, horse barns, and carriage houses, which by my time were deserted and accessible by means of broken windows and crooked backdoors and cellars.
High above the town, overlooking the Hudson River, corporate magnates of the nineteen twenties had constructed larger estates, most of which had been torn down or deserted after the Crash. Here you could find the overgrown ruins of formal Italian gardens, collapsed pergolas, fallen pillars, and cracked swimming pools half filled with green waters and golden-eyed frogs who eyed you from the detritus of sodden leaves and then ducked into the obscurity of the depths when you went to grab them.
Here, amidst the ruins, in the six miles of second-growth woods that ran along the cliff there was rich picking for the adventurous youths who lived otherwise normal lives in the lower sections of the town. And to this spot on any given Saturday morning in warm weather, we, the nomadic tribes of our neighborhood, would ascend to fight. We recapitulated history in this mythic landscape. From the battlements of the terrace balconies we defended our land against the attacking hordes of imaginary enemies with sticks and showers of stones and great clods of mud. We fought day-long battles here and only at the requisite hour—sundown—would we give up and return to our boring, albeit safe homes.
There was only one estate in the entire six mile stretch of woodland that had yet to be conquered by nature, let alone by our militant armies. The house was owned by a man we used to call Old King Cole and was a vast brownstone place with spired turrets and a mean-looking iron fence surrounding it, the type of fence with spear-pointed tips. The grounds, which purportedly had been laid out by the firm of Frederick Law Olmstead, were extensive and unmanaged, with two immense copper beech trees framing a briar-strewn entrance, a small orchard just west of the house, a sunken garden with a frog pond, and many species of exotic trees, including, I was later told, a rare Franklinia.
Of all the properties in the community, of all the woodlots, overgrown backyards, gardens, and frog-haunted swimming pools, King Cole's place held the greatest attraction. For one thing there was a deserted carriage house at the back of the grounds to which we had gained access and used as a hide-out. But the other thing is that, unlike other landholders in the community, Old King Cole did not seem to appreciate trespassers, even though his property was at a remove from the other holdings in the town. Periodically, sensing an invasion, Old King Cole would emerge from the darkened interior of his house to reprimand us—a tottering old man with an ebony cane and a palsied hand. We were too fast for him. We always broke through various escape routes we had established and headed for other territory. Once or twice he called the police, but they too were disinclined to leave their vehicles and scramble through the tangle of briar and bittersweet and ivy strewn pillars to catch us.
One afternoon Old King Cole surprised two of us and drove us into a walled corner of his sunken garden. Once we were trapped, he approached us, shuffling, his cane raised ominously above his head, his green eyes burning under his brushsmoke eyebrows. We thought we were done for. We would be thrashed, perhaps murdered, at very least bloodied from the full strike of his cane. But instead the old man halted in front of us, and there, amidst the wild briars and ivies, delivered a resounding lecture on the nature of title.
"My property," he intoned, "My holdings. My kingdom. My nation." Then, advancing a few steps he pointed southwards with his cane to the town below the cliffs. "Your property, your nation. Return to your country. Respect the national boundaries."
It was a good lecture, but it had the wrong effect. Up to that time, I had no concept of the nature of trespass. Forbidden passage consisted of Old King Cole's land, and an even more ominous place in the south of the town called the Baron's that was surrounded with a high stucco wall and reportedly guarded by Great Danes. With King Cole's proclamation, the world, which up to that time had seemed to me a wide collective space that invited exploration, was divided and quartered, and guarded by owners of private property. But on the heels of this revelation there came an epiphany. I understood then the lure of trespass, the freedom of open space, and the sublime possibility inherent in wilderness.
Kathleen Dean Moore
Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water
Chair, Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University
Do you remember the sound a mother makes, knocking on the door of a damp cardboard box in the morning? She sticks her finger in the hole that serves as a doorknob and pulls. The cut edge of cardboard sticks to the box, so when she tugs hard, the door pops open all at once, and the box sways. All the squares turn to parallelograms and the window-shutters flap open, swinging out over the crayoned window boxes, the red and purple daisies, the pasted-on picket fence, the twining vines. She reaches in the door and leaves three hard-boiled eggs.
The box has grown weak-kneed and mottled overnight, wicking moisture from the lawn. By the mail slot, smooth paper has begun to curl away from the corrugation. But with morning sun shining through gaps along the front door, the air in the box is warm and smells like new books. My sisters and I sit cross-legged, nightgowns taut across our knees, and eat the eggs for breakfast. We call ourselves The Three Flowers, and this is our clubhouse.
It takes a lot of sawing with a steak knife to make a refrigerator carton into a house. The first cut is the dangerous one, stabbing the blade through the cardboard thickness. But once the knife is embedded in the box, you can saw out a window or a door or an escape hatch or a chimney hole. Then you can color the curtains with crayons and paste pictures on the walls.
We didn't use sleeping bags back in those days. We slept on rugs woven from old fabric—every outgrown dress and stained tablecloth torn into inch-wide strips, then the strips sewn end-to-end and woven into rugs by a neighbor who wore house-slippers all day. If we used blankets, I don't remember them. We probably had no use for blankets during Ohio summer nights, nights so hot that we would lie on our backs, spit in the air, and let the spray settle cool on our faces.
This time, I have my goose-down sleeping bag and a high-tech foam pad. The weather has changed in the fifty years since I was a child; it's the difference between Ohio and Oregon, where a sea-wind slides between the mountains at dusk and the temperature drops twenty degrees. Refrigerator cartons don't seem to have changed though, and after the workers dollied our new refrigerator into place, they left the box unceremoniously by the street for the trash-men, just the way I remember. Back then, we would roll boxes home, end over end over end, sometimes for blocks. Today, I hauled the box up the driveway in my Suburban.
I'm embarrassed to be stabbing a good Sheffield steak knife into this cardboard box, sawing windows and doors, and my husband doesn't even ask. But I know that memories live in specific places, and sometimes you can find the entrance to the past, if you can just find the right place. This has happened to me: I will walk into an opening in a juniper hedge, or onto a landing where a stairway turns toward the attic, and it's as if I had dropped down a dark tunnel that opens into light-flooded childhood memories. So I wonder if this cardboard box will take me back to a particular kind of joy I haven't felt for a long, long time. There's nothing wrong with trying, I tell my husband, but he says, hey, nobody's arguing with you.
He and I share a silent beer, watching the moon speckle the lawn under the Douglas firs, until it's time for bed. Then he gives me a quick hug, and I climb into the box to spend the night alone. In the past, my sisters and I worried about neighborhood boys, skinny scab-kneed buzz-headed boys who lied to their mothers and snuck out barefoot at night to kick the box over and run away snickering. Better to stay awake all night than to have your world convulse and turn on its side, spilling you into the laughing dark. There are no boys to worry about now, but I lie awake anyway, shifting in my sleeping bag, wondering how three little girls ever fit in one box. A car door slams. The neighbor's clothes-dryer shuffles and clinks. I hear a slurry whistle from the barn owl that nests in the cedars at the end of the street. Then the neighborhood grows quiet.
I wake up suddenly in darkness so engulfing I don't know if my eyes are open or shut. When I raise a hand to touch my eyes, my fingers collide with the top of the box, only a few inches from my face. The lid is soft and sagging. I reach out for my husband, but my hands touch cold walls instead. Why am I alone? The air is dank, damper than a cardboard box should be on its first night in the backyard. I can't hear anything at all. And never have I felt such darkness—not just the absence of light, but a darkness thick and real and smelling of turned earth.
If this box is a tunnel through time, it's taking me in altogether the wrong direction. In one movement, I lift both legs and batter them through the door, roll onto my knees, and crawl out of the sleeping bag and the box. Climbing to my feet, I kick the box until it collapses on one side and sinks flat on the lawn. Suddenly out of breath, I find myself standing in the backyard, in a long nightgown, in darkly falling rain. The rain has plastered oak leaves against the white siding of the house and knocked the last petals from the wind anemones, scattering them across the grass. As I walk into the porch light, petals stick to my feet.
Robin C. Moore
Childhood's Domain: Play and Place in Child Development
Professor of Landscape Architecture, North Carolina State University
What is going on when a small child fondles the fringe on the edge of a rug? What is happening when a tiny hand pulls a blade of grass from a shadowy lawn? Would the life of the child be different if the rug had no fringe, if the lawn were replaced by asphalt?The natural world offers a special place for children to discover themselves, to learn to distinguish "me" from "not me." I grew up on the edge of a small town south of London's greenbelt. From an early age we roamed freely, except when Battle of Britain dogfights raged overhead.
A track made long ago by wheeled vehicles ran along one side of the bracken places in Britains Woods. Just off the track grew a sweet chestnut tree, medium age with branches close to the ground, great for climbing. A stand of foxgloves in late spring thrust pink, chest-high columns through the bracken. The fresh flowerlets open sequentially as the top of the column continues to grow. We used to pick flowerlets, examine their delicate interior markings, sucking the ends to taste nectar, gently holding them between pursed lips, pretending they were fairy trumpets. Note: this plant now routinely appears on lists of "toxic" or "poisonous plants" because of the heart-stimulating chemistry of digitalis. Maybe if we had boiled pounds of the plant to drink, some harm would have resulted. Fortunately there were no adults around to intervene and no paranoia about child safety and this "potentially" hazardous plant. I live as proof, along with surely thousands of kids, that this potential has not been realized!
"Secret" is the special meaning children give to a place when they possess it deeply. Possession, which persists like love in long-term memory, comes from the hands—from interaction or a kind of making, or the creaturely ways animals define territorial boundaries. Nature is really the only medium that allows repeatable rewriting or remarking by the same children over time as they elaborate the place-relationship. Such informal, natural spaces are rapidly disappearing by the blade and under the rationally directed bulldozers of our technologically driven political economy. "We have to teach people to be more flexible," the radio commentator suggests, "in order to be able to change careers and jobs as globalization grows." But can you teach flexibility? Play gives a child a sense of a natural relationship that has no particular limits.
For a group of children playing together, nature is a unique medium that can be continuously and instantaneously used for an infinite range of expression. We must have been around thirteen when we started to spend most of our free time in the small wood next to Hugh's house. There Hugh and I found an old electric motor which we took back to his Dad's garage workbench, hooked it up to a main power supply, and got it to work—a secret fragment of a secret place. Our visits to the wood then led to imagining other ways it could be used. We needed a place to ride our bikes. No longer satisfied with racing around and around the landscaped island at the bottom of Croft Way, we wanted a more challenging track. Over several weeks we built with pickaxe and shovel a ride twisting and turning around the trees in a circular loop 100 feet across.
One day we had the idea of building an underground "camp," the final adventure of our neighborhood childhood. We had the tools to dig the hole, and our ambition was limitless. One of us brought a bow saw from home to cut down a tall slender tree, which we cut into logs to span the hole as a roof. With four or five of us sharing a saw that had not been sharpened in years, it took many hours of very hard work. I can't recall if there was an image or story that motivated our energy. I think it was just the idea of living underground—secretly.
All the camp lacked was heat. Hence, the "stove adventure." Our plan was to move one of the cast-iron wood-burning stoves from an abandoned row of Nissen huts, where barrage balloon crews had been billeted during the war, two miles to our camp in the woods. The stove must have weighed at least 100 pounds. How to move it? About that time, I had constructed a wooden cart with two old bicycle wheels that could be towed behind my bicycle. Unhitched, it became the stove transport: somehow we managed to trundle uphill and down, yard by yard, on the public roads between the RAF camp and our underground hideaway. The last thirty yards we had to drag the stove through the woods to its final location. We lowered it into place with a rope, added a length of metal stovepipe, completed the roof around it and lit it up. It worked! Soon our earthy abode was deliciously warm and comfortable. I still recall sitting on "benches" fashioned out of the solid earth around the base of the excavations, the mixed aroma of freshly exposed dirt and woodsmoke in the air.
In following the streams, watching the seasons, and crossing the woods, we found both autonomy and adventure, discovery and invention. We learned about cooperation, as well as skills necessary to solve practical problems—skills that have been valuable all my life. For me the meaning of secret is deeply linked with sharing among trustworthy friends. Thus a secret place is discovered as the first opening to a delicious mix of predictable, anticipated change and spontaneous, surprise events, continually influenced by the perceptions, interpretations, and creative imaginations of child explorers. The process usually cannot be shared with adults, unless they can recapture the slow temporal and intimate physical scale of childhood exploration. For most adults, perceptually conditioned by clock time and automobile space, this is behaviorally impossible.
As semi-wild landscapes become transformed into suburb and city, the possibility of secondary transformation into children's wild and secret gardens must be ensured through policy development and professional intervention. Burnett's Secret Garden in many ways is a universal garden that all children need to play in, work in, and explore to discover the magic of nature and to nurture their own quality of life, health, and human wholeness. This year I met with a photographer from SPACE magazine covering a story on a recently completed child development center play garden. It was late fall, midmorning, the sun trying hard to assert itself through a high cloud cover. Both of us were focused on the visual scene, taking in the fine detail of the processes of nature as we hunted for "photo-ops." I commented on the fragrance of fall that permeated the yard, that subtle smell of damp decomposition underway on the surface of the soil, an indicator of energy transformation in readiness for the next growing season. "Isn't it incredible to think this is the first time in their lives these kids have experienced the natural cycle of this place where they spend so many hours each day?" His observation illuminated the essence of why this effort to reintroduce the natural world matters. The current generation will spend 5/7 of their childhood in experientially deprived spaces. As fewer and fewer children have access to open space, fewer and fewer attach value to nature's richness. Deprived of this experience, they may see no reason, as adults, to ensure its provision for their own children, and so on, until the opportunity to explore the world of nature is itself lost. No well-established tradition of natural learning exists in the childcare profession even though most of the progressive thinkers in early childhood education (Froebel, Montessori, Pestalozzi) have emphasized the natural world as a critical setting for learning. There children can make do with very little.
Secret can be anywhere where children possess their environment by making places, by the way those places offer the twofold gifts of adventure and sensory identity. Small size and muscular development limit children's ability physically to manipulate their surroundings. What must be "designed in" are ways in which infants and toddlers can possess the Earth in the first steps of childhood within a limited physical range and level of effort. Nature must be very close at hand, instantly reachable, graspable, with the whole body immersed. By "design" I mean the act of designing the possibility for action, not the actions themselves. The design of a place that affords as many actions as possible—this is the bounty of nature for children.
April Newlin
Writes a nature column for The WaltonSun (Florida)
Practices clinical psychology in New Orleans
I was eight years old, waiting for the crabs to bite, tracing cracks in the old worn planks of the pier. Already the wood cooked in the morning sun, drying and shredding in splinters as long and sharp as the spines of an urchin. The pier had a way of working its way inside of you. At the end of a summer, I would bring home two or three barbs wedged in the palm of my hand or the ball of my foot. I could swear to this day that they never came out, that they were absorbed into the fabric of my being as if they belonged.
Waveland, Mississippi, was a quiet respite from the hot haze of New Orleans. One month each summer, my family settled into my grandmother's cottage on Bay St. Louis, but for my sister, her best friend Carol, and I, the pier was the place, the center, the whole reason for being there at all. Within minutes, we would cross the beach road, shimmy over the stone sea wall, and climb on board. The slats sloped up to a gate and extended into the water for half a city block. Just past midway, the pier widened with benches and an enclosed bathhouse beneath a roof. Steps led down to a lower deck which hovered inches above the water. At the end, a ladder etched with barnacles dropped into the bay and disappeared. By the time I was born, hurricanes had whittled the pier down to a gray skeleton on tall spindly pilings that swayed in the wind as if shifting from one tired leg to another. A sudden jump or dash down the steps could send the whole platform into a wobble and the railings only magnified the effect by bending if you leaned on them. Yet, the wharf had all the grace of an old sage. From the time we could tread water, the pier became a privilege, a ritual of independence renewed each year, every summer building on the one before.
It was a tree house on pilings, a club house over water, a hide-out without walls. Home was too far for help with most situations. Usually we secured not only the pier but the bay for ourselves. From morning until lunch and then again in the afternoon, we lived over the water, watching waves, catching crabs, hunting gars with scoop nets, and playing games on deck. The bay had to be watched, patrolled and scanned. Some days the bay darkened like a good roux and anything could hide in that opaque soup. Below the water line, the pier grew hairy green patches as if underneath it all the thing was alive, growing up out of the sandy silt bottom. We never swam without sounding the alarm, a few hardy and robust kicks off the slimy steps to send the sting rays flying.
Mostly, we spent our time crabbing. I got to know crabs intimately during those years, the way they bubbled and chattered when they needed water, the advantage of separating the violent testy ones from the others, and the sponge of eggs that earned a female another season. We cared for them all day, watering and shading, dipping the wooden hamper just far enough into the bay to let them taste their cool home again and again. We came to love what we hunted.
The crabs occupied brief spikes of activity in an otherwise slow and uneventful day. The wait, the empty space between the pulls of the nets, challenged our patience and taxed the rule of the half hour delay between net checks. We had counting rituals and songs. We watched thunderheads swell over the bay and shivered in the cold pelting of a summer shower. The bay boiled with whitecaps, the wind whipped salt spray like wet towels at our backs and we wondered if the pier would make it, if the old dock would succumb then and there, toppling into the murky bay with a tired sigh. Occasionally something big happened, out of the ordinary, and we forgot about the rules and the routine.
The space capsule remains a mystery to this day. From our high perch, we followed the curious speck on the horizon. At first we identified it as a raft, then a skiff, or perhaps a buoy. The object inched closer and our ideas grew more elaborate. Carol suggested a huge inflated sombrero. We waited, watched, and tracked it down the sea wall at least a mile beyond the pier. As it bobbed within yards of our grasp, a truck arrived, proclaimed the trophy a weather balloon and departed with the prize. It was a deflating moment and we returned to the pier both stunned at our discovery and angry that we had been cheated. We had reeled that catch in with our eyes, slowly, coaxing it until we realized finally that this was no sodden driftwood or lost beach toy but a finely designed and engineered aircraft.
The alligator, on the other hand, slipped under the pier and over the crab nets without notice. When we spotted the eyes, riding the surface of the water with a robber's mask of brown water, we manned the decks of the pier as if under attack. Alligators didn't belong in the brackish bay. We doubted our eyes and yet we knew the telltale markers—the brow, the snout, and the occasional flash of a serpentine tail. No one swam for days until the old lizard finally appeared belly up at the sea wall. Anything could happen out there or so it seemed. The pier had risks and since I was the youngest I took more chances, not out of choice but by being chosen. I can still remember the time that we forgot the key to the gate, how I scrambled over the railing, teetered on a rotted two by four, and swung out over the water twenty-five feet in the air like the boom on a sailboat. As I swooped to a landing on the other side, I saw the stiffened smiles of my sister and Carol, and in their nervous laughter I sensed their disbelief that the pier held.
The absence of adults for long periods of time allowed us to be daring, but also offered us time to explore and master on our own terms. We found our own rhythm, designed our own rules, and immersed ourselves in the patterns of the bay. The mood of the water changed daily and sometimes by the hour—clear or cloudy, salty or brackish, high or low tide, benevolent green or menacing umber. Every nuance affected the fish, the crabs, the sea nettles, and our relationship to them. We smelled a storm coming and heard it in the water before we felt it in the wind. The three of us became as weathered, toughened, and callused as that wizened pier, and as it swayed in the gusts of an August squall we heaved with it, anchored in the wonder of it all.
When my grandmother died, my parents sold the cottage. A year later, Hurricane Camille took the house and the pier. Not a splinter left. Thirty years later, I stand on the deck of my summer place, tweezers in hand, pulling wood fragments out of my son's soft foot. The house sits on stilts, high on a sand dune, and I know of no better place on earth. I tally the days until I visit again, until I find myself in the counting of crabs and the cry of osprey. "I can't grip the tiny pieces with the tweezers," I tell my son, "but don't worry, they build character," and he dashes off in his sweet bare feet unawares.
Joyce Carol Oates
Blonde
Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University
Spying on the new baby, from my secret hiding place.
Spying on those who'd betrayed me. Never would I forgive them!
In hot May in a long-ago time lying on the filthy plank floor of the upstairs of the old barn. Lying on my stomach in the pain of humiliation and hurt sharp as sunburn. Amid clumps of dust and straw, the body husks of dead insects that, living, would have made me scream.
I was peering through the slats of the weatherworn boards at the figures on the grass below. My mother I adored, my grandmother, and the new baby. My infant brother who was the new baby, five months old and beginning to crawl. I was peering at them, invisible to them. My astonished and outraged and unwavering eyes. The baby was no longer me, but another!
Your first lesson: the world betrays.
There I was breathless in hiding, upstairs in the barn. In a forbidden place, for the floorboards were rotted and loose and might collapse beneath my feet; except I knew, from my father, how to walk on the crossbeams. Crawling then behind old farming implements, unused for years, festooned in cobwebs and turned to rust. This was my favorite secret space. Hidden there, beneath a window and able to peer out through slats in the boards, knowing no one could see me. Shimmering light, and I was in shadow. What made this space special was, it wasn't in the pear orchard, or in the fields, or down by the creek, or beneath the bridge, or in a deep cattail-choked drainage ditch at the edge of our property; it wasn't a long hike away, but close by the house. I could lie there calmly observing my mother, my grandmother, the new baby. Unseen by them as if I didn't exist.
Did I know I was inventing myself? I did not know and could not have guessed. Beginning the lifelong process of invention that is self. Hiding from adults. Saying no! to adults.
For when they'd called to me, bringing the baby outside onto the lawn, my mother's voice lifting—"Joyce? Joyce?"—it gave me a spiteful pleasure, a stab of pleasure indistinguishable from pain, not to answer.
No, I wouldn't answer!
Where is Joyce, Joyce is gone.
Oh where is Joyce, Joyce has run away.
What luxuriant fantasies of revenge, in childhood's secret spaces. Not-seen by those you are eagerly, avidly watching.
I would be six years old in another few weeks. My infant brother Robin, one day to be Fred, Jr., had been born on Christmas Day.
What is a new baby, to the first-born, but the very embodiment of mystery? Mystery-that-wounds?
My earliest memory of the new baby was confusion and excitement, an upset in the routine of our lives. Something is going to happen but what? In this era, children weren't informed—at least, I had not been—of impending births. The words pregnant, pregnancy would not have been freely uttered. If I'd noticed anything unusual about my young mother's body, and I doubt that I did, I would not have known to ask about it, nor had anyone offered an explanation. Up to the very eve of my mother's labor I knew no more of the imminent arrival of the new baby than I would have known of death and oblivion and the end of time.
I'd wakened on Christmas morning to hear voices, excited voices, and these voices my parents' voices yet they seemed not to be speaking to me, or of me. I did not hear the magical name Joyce. My mother's and my father's voices for the first time—or so in my total self-absorption I would think—not centered upon Joyce.
For five and a half years I had been the baby. For this unquestioned eternity I had been the baby. When visitors came, when my mother's numerous sisters and cousins came, I was the baby, much admired, fussed over and hugged, how could I have comprehended the possibility of a day, an hour, when I was no longer the baby?
Christmas Day, a special day, yet my father took my mother away, I was left behind. I was baffled, hurt, frightened. Left behind! My father had driven my mother to the Lockport hospital seven miles away, but I wouldn't know that at the time. What I knew was: my mother can vanish, even on Christmas Day.
What I knew was: Joyce wasn't so important after all.
Almost, I'd come to think (I'd been encouraged to think?) that the very word Joyce! means special. One-of-a-kind. Baby. To be the much-anticipated first-born of young, romantically-in-love parents, what a privilege! And for five and a half years to bask in that privilege, that unalloyed love, as an infant basks in its mother's womb, utterly protected, and blind.
A theory: all of metaphysics, the anxious attempt of positioning human consciousness in an unknown and unknowable exterior space, arises from our expulsion from that centeredness.
When at last they'd brought the new baby home from the hospital, Joyce was summoned, and, aghast, told to look: your little baby brother, his name is Robin! Look at his blue eyes, look at his tiny fingers, his tiny curling toes! When I shied away, jamming my fingers into my mouth, when I shook my head no, they said teasing You'll be sorry if you don't.
Sorry if you don't, well I did not. Not at that moment, at any rate. Though later of course, of course later, fascinated too, and proud, yes but sullen, tearful, hurt. Was I a spoiled child, had I been a spoiled only-child, never would I forgive this shock! this insult! Running away to hide in the chicken coop, in the shed beside the barn, in the barn, upstairs where it's forbidden, running away to hide my hurt, a child's lacerated heart, you can't anticipate how swiftly such wounds mend, how quick a childtears come, scalding, spilling down her cheeks, and wiped away, and again spilling, and again wiped away, in the tumult of emotions that is childhood.
Always they could find me, if they made a game of it, my young parents, and seriously looked. Joyce? Where are you? Hide-and-seek. Our earliest, ecstatic game.
Where's a child so young to go?
Later there would be the orchard, the fields. In the country, all of the outdoors is a possibility to hide in. Like time, going on forever. Yet our most prized secret spaces tend to be close to home, and safety.
Secret spaces of childhood: the very words are poetry. Evoking the lost landscapes of the past. When even hurt was precious. Those secret spaces we discover when the open, public spaces of childhood—the family, the household—aren't sufficient any longer to define us.
When our child's pride is hurt. When we believe ourselves betrayed. When we learn by instinct the necessity, and the cunning, of separating ourselves from adults. When, for once, our small stature is an advantage, for once!
Crawling away to hide. Hiding in plain sight. What bliss!
One day soon, it might have been that very day, I would be playing with the new baby like everyone else. Or maybe more avidly, with more excited fascination, than others. For the new baby was myself, wasn't he?—or, somehow, Joyce was herself the newbaby, again an infant just learning to crawl on hands and knees, trying to talk, making absurd gurgling squealing sounds, flailing and pumping his arms. It was too difficult to comprehend. No, it couldn't be comprehended. But there was so much not to be comprehended. Staring in amazement at this hot-skinned baby with the startling blue eyes, named Robin, told repeatedly Your brother! you have a baby brother! look how he's looking at you, this mysterious baby one day to be Fred, Jr.; in the five-month infant what yearning, what hunger, that quivering, that need to crawl, to sit up, try to balance himself, pushing his clumsy little boneless-seeming body into contortions new to it, comical but heroic acrobatics that left him baffled, lying on the carpet on his side, baby-limbs pumping. . . . How we laughed! How we adored him! Those moist rounded eyes darting swiftly from face to face, what was he seeing? how did he comprehend us? alert and excited and squealing as if a game were being played, yes certainly a game of incalculable complexity was being played, we were all playing it and the point of the game was the new baby at its center. And not me. Not Joyce. But Joyce was encouraged to stroke Robin's fine, soft hair, to play with him on the carpet, and hold him, and help bathe and diaper him, and talk with him, as one day how many decades later, across what dizzying chasm of Time, Fred and I would confer on the phone, earnestly, worriedly, trying not to be anxious, our voices unconsciously lowered as if—but this was absurd—our parents might somehow hear us, groping for words and flailing about in this new bewilderment at being no longer children, but adults of advancing middle age presented with the great riddle of our lives: how to help our aging, ailing parents, still living on that same rural property in a much-changed Millersport, New York, how to help them in what we all must know is the final stage of their life together, without hurting their pride and their wish—a fairy tale wish!—for continued independence. One day Fred and I would so confer, often. But not for a long time.
Secret spaces of childhood. That cryptic little poem of Emily Dickinson's that haunts me, as if, perversely, it were an utterance out of my own quite happy and ordinary childhood:
Out of the secret spaces of childhood we invent ourselves. We begin the lifelong process of invention that is self. But we see, for the first time, irrevocably, wonderfully, how the world continues without us, even as it calls our name.
Zibby Oneal
The Language of Goldfish
American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, 1980, 1982, 1985
Madeleine is sprawled upside-down in a chair, book held at arms' length above her head. She is reading. I know she won't hear me when I tell her lunch is ready. I will need to tell her several times before, vague-eyed, she turns to look at me. So compelling, apparently, is this book about trolls.
She has read the book at least three times, but, clearly, she still finds it engrossing. In my grandmotherly way I wonder what there could be about this book to merit so many rereadings. And yet, almost as I am asking myself the question, I think of Rackety-Packety House and the number of times I read it the winter I was eight.
That winter I no sooner finished the book than I began to read it again. Its story of a dollhouse family coming secretly to life whenever humans left the room enthralled me. It was not the magic, itself, that I found so fascinating. It was the idea that one could have a secret life. I deeply desired a secret life of my own, but I was encountering difficulties.
Chief among these was the fact that I lived with a mind-reader. My mother was able to take one look at me and know in an instant what I was thinking. Or so it seemed. I believed that she could read my thoughts as easily as if they were printed across my forehead—a circumstance that made a secret life difficult to sustain. As I saw it, my only hope of privacy was distance.
There was a lilac bush in our backyard that made a fairly good refuge in the summertime. I could, and often did, retreat there to crouch beneath its branches, screened by leaves, and think my thoughts in peace. But this was a temporary solution. When autumn came and the leaves fell, I was visible from the house again and no longer sole owner of my secrets.
The autumn I was eight the leaves began to fall as usual and I, as usual, began to anticipate another transparent winter, thoughts as exposed as fish in a bowl. But, as it happened, this was the winter I made a discovery that solved the problem. One day it occurred to me that I had been reading Rackety-Packety House for over an hour without a single question or comment directed my way. At first I credited the book, itself, with mysterious powers to ward off intrusion, but soon I saw that any book would do. In a reading family a reader is respected. Pick up a book and you're left alone.
This discovery led to another. Gradually I realized that it was the appearance of reading that mattered. So long as I held an open book, as long as my eyes were on the page, I could count on being left to myself to explore my thoughts in private. There was some dishonesty in this. I saw that. When I heard my mother proudly telling friends that I had become a real reader, my conscience troubled me a little, but only a little. A twinge of conscience seemed a small price to pay for the luxury of being left alone.
All winter I gazed blankly, blissfully at printed pages. Words scattered and drifted on the white paper, meaningless as Chinese characters to me, absorbed in my own world. I suppose that sometimes I must have done a little real reading but, if so, I don't recall it. What I remember about that winter is drifting print and solitude.
Oddly, I have no memory now of the thoughts I was so determined to protect. Possibly it was never their content that mattered. Perhaps their real importance was simply that they belonged to me. They were part of a new and shaky sense of myself, proof of an independent existence.
It may be that all hide-outs serve a similar purpose. They are places to try out being separate, spaces in which to contrive a self distinct from others. In the beginning this project of self-definition is a fragile undertaking, requiring courage and determination. But perhaps as much as either of these it requires a private place where a child can safely practice being somebody different from anyone else.
I think this, looking at Madeleine who is dangling from the chair now, anchored by her knees. Her book is lying on the rug a bare two inches from her nose. Is it really possible to read a book two inches from your nose? Is she actually reading? I don't ask. Suddenly I am reluctant to disturb her. Instead I go back into the kitchen where the lunch is waiting and decide that it can wait for a while.
Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr.
Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo
Professor of Education, University of Miami
My brother Nicholas set the curtains on fire the day I was born. I quickly learned to play by myself. My parents never quite learned how to deal with him. He set the tone for our household—making life unpredictable and sometimes violent.
When she was seven, my younger sister Ann moved in with her friend Lindy. Her mailing address didn't change, but her inner self moved across the street and three doors down. She had her own room at her friend's house. We would see her during the week and as part of holidays, but essentially she was gone.
Left alone with Nicholas and my parents, I became a lonely child. I sought solace in books. In books I found a geography that I could shape and explore at my leisure. It was, in many regards, like the space I found to play in under the dining room table—a place where the world could not intrude.
The books I loved most were the ones with grand adventures and secret worlds. My clearest memory from when I was eight was a day when, from early morning until late into the afternoon, I was cocooned in a canvas hammock in our backyard reading The Swiss Family Robinson. This was not the celluloid drama created by Disney, but the masterwork by the eighteenth-century Swiss cleric Johann David Wyss. I was transported to an unpopulated tropical island with caves and coves and all manner of adventures.
That same year I read Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. With its hidden spaces beneath the ocean and its submarine the Nautilus, the book captured my thoughts and imagination. I quickly moved on to other Verne novels like The Mysterious Island and Journey to the Center of the Earth.
I often wonder what secret spaces I would escape to if I were a child today. Would I read a book or would I enter cyberspace instead? I suspect the latter.
In cyberspace I could interact freely with adults or more interesting children than those who occupied my day-to-day life. In a chat room, or in a role-playing game like a MOO (Object Oriented Multi User Dungeon), I could reinvent my life and my self.
Online participatory games like MOOs are places where children and adolescents can assume whatever character or personality they want. This is done through an "Avatar," a term from Hindu mythology which refers to an incarnation of a god. In an online gaming context, an Avatar is a character you create and define for yourself (literally an alter ego or second self) that you can insert into the action and play of a game.
When I was a child, I became characters in the novels I was reading: the tragic and lonely figure of Captain Nemo searching the seas for justice, or one of the boys (Hans or Fritz) in The Swiss Family Robinson. As I grew older and my reading became more sophisticated, I assumed (in my mind) the role of characters like the sorcerer Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In my books, I was protected from others—and yet engaged in a society. When I read The Swiss Family Robinson, I was the secret son who watched, and looked, and learned throughout all of the adventures. When entering cyberspace and constructions like MOOs, I enter a region that is secret and isolated from the physical and social world that I occupy. In the secret spaces of cyberspace there are distinct dangers, problems, and rules quite different from those encountered in books.
In cyberspace you can participate in violence that is limited only by your imagination. Power has almost no restraints. Magic is very real. Spells can be cast and opponents vanquished. In a book, the author can set limits to the secret space the child enters. Librarians, teachers, and parents can determine whether or not certain books and the fantasy realms they provide are suitable. Materials deemed inappropriate can be kept out of the hands of the child reader.
Somehow the secret space provided by the book seems much safer and much more appropriate to the experience of childhood. The dynamic of cyberspace is significantly different than the dynamic of the book. It is clear that we have entered a brave new world whose secret spaces are more like the seemingly infinite black holes found in outer space than the comforting spaces found in books. One cannot help but wonder what we might be losing, and just how concerned we should be for our children.
Paul Roazen
Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Free Vision
Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science, York University
Memory is notoriously tricky, and I think formal autobiography only justified by the most talented, but I would like to venture to recreate what has always seemed to me a paradise from my early childhood—a little beach which was part of the small town at the beginning of Cape Cod where we used to go summers during World War II. I cannot remember ever discussing this place before, and I have never checked my version of things with any surviving relatives; so it remains a personal realm even as I am writing about it now.
Since I was born in 1936, I am thinking of the years when I was, let us say, four to six or seven years old. I have looked at some photo albums, and there are shots of me at this beach in those years. (The photos were almost certainly taken by our long-standing housekeeper.) What strikes me now as most memorable about that time is just how unprepossessing the beach can look from adult eyes. I happened to go back there a few years ago, and I can testify to how utterly lacking in glamour it now is. Yet it is very much today as it was then: a smallish stretch of sand adjoining a good-sized body of water ultimately connected to Buzzards Bay. There was no surf, just the changing of tides; on exceptionally windy days there might be whitecaps, but it was so tranquil that there was never a lifeguard.
I can still vividly remember exhilaratingly setting off alone, barefoot, in the early morning with my pail and shovel heading for a wonderful day at the beach. I would most likely have known whether it was going to be high tide or low tide, or in which direction in between the water was moving. Probably it was a weekday. Our house was so close to the beach, and the traffic so minimal, that even on Saturdays and Sundays traffic would not have been any problem. The street I have in mind lacked a sidewalk, but there were some sidewalks in our section of town. The cottages were all set close together, but at the start of the day everything was quiet.
The beach itself was wholly transformed as the hours passed, and on weekends people came who would never visit in the normal course of events; on holidays it could be crowded. (The absence of a parking lot meant that it was restricted to the local people who got there almost entirely by foot.) It was possible to go and come from it all on one's own; I am presuming it was a nice day, and therefore I could expect my older brother and younger sister to come along at some time during the morning. One of my cousins, who lived nearby, was also a reliable playmate, and we had a fun live-in grandmother. But I could get intensely absorbed with building and digging in the sand; castles with moats were designed to withstand for at least a while the ravages of water. If the tide were coming in, then my objective would be to make constructions far enough back so that they would withstand the oncoming water. The low tide (at which the beach was technically at its most expanded) seemed to last awhile, and would not be the time of greatest excitement. The day's work would be interrupted at least once daily by the ice-cream truck, and small change would enable one to join in the lineup. A simple popsicle, a "push-up," or the more expensive ice-cream sandwiches, tasted perfect in hot weather.
Talk at the beach was more significant to me than the swimming; but the water was warmer when the tide was not at its highest. At the lowest tide the sand was unattractively squishy under foot, and one seemed almost to sink in. Special excursions were possible, such as walking a bit along the edges of the bay; the shells of dead horseshoe crabs seemed reminders of dangerous possibilities which had been miraculously rendered safe. The agony of stepping on the upright tail of such a creature seemed too dreadful to contemplate. There would be occasional dinghies sitting in the sand; getting in and out of them was an adventure in itself. Late in the war we had the use of a small war-surplus inflatable raft, but I don't remember our ever paddling very far. Sometimes we had the inner tubing of tires for swimming, but that pail and shovel were the main essentials of my beach life.
The excitement came from the small beach itself, all the daily changes that took place in it, and the shifting sets of people who arrived. There seemed an almost endless variety of things going on. For special occasions like birthdays we would get taken by car to Silver Beach near Falmouth, and although that always seemed an unusual treat, our own little beach never lost its special allure. In hindsight, it was such a humdrum dull-seeming place that older children would have been bored by it, and so it was frequented mainly by small children and their caretakers.
Although the sand and the water were both perfectly clean, it was, in retrospect, one of the worst beaches I ever saw; when I think of the world-class beaches on Martha's Vineyard, for example, that I later took my own children to, it scarcely seems possible that I was ever once so content with the space given to me. But I don't think that as a parent I ever looked back on beaches with the eyes of a small child. Spectacular expanses of sand or broad vistas were not what attracted me as a youngster; waves are of course only for older children. I suppose, now that I have spent so much of my time writing, that I have continued to live in my imagination; but the reality of that beach, and how it could ever have so entranced me, brings back how much I lived largely on my own resources. The stability and predictability of the outside world then made possible my happiness; but how busy I kept, and how entirely content I was, is testimony to the different perspective a child brings to things. The relative autonomy of my existence at that beach lends a special glow to my whole childhood. The fact that a world war was going on only entered our lives in the form of special costumes worn for dancing occasions. The main part of town had places which were part of the world of soldiers, but they only bore on our lives in the most distant way.
Rainy days did happen, but then there would be movie houses which would open up for the occasion. One could walk (a long way) to a couple of them too, but in the rain that would not have been likely. A whole separate set of memories would be associated with the break in our normal schedule involved in going to movies in bad weather. But I am writing now to commemorate how absolutely magical and joyous was the social entity associated with that one small beach. At the time it seemed completely fulfilling, and one of the highlights of a city kid's whole year. However claustrophobic and secure my extended family life, that beach provided an escape hatch from the outside world. No matter how crowded the life we led, with schools, lessons, hobbies, and religious routines, the beach remained a symbol of how the external world was beckoning.
Robyn Sarah
Promise of Shelter (stories)
The Touchstone: Poems New and Selected
At the bottom of the slatted iron fire-escape there was a place where we used to play, not together but singly and at different times, because it was a secret and hidden place, enclosed on three sides by the back of our house and the house adjacent. Hardly any sun ever reached this place, and when it did it was like a pale finger that crept down between the buildings to touch a spot on the ground without warming it. No grass grew here. The earth was hard-packed and damp, and it had a smell like potatoes going to sprout. In places it was dusted with a thin fuzz of yellow-green moss that you could scrape away with the edge of last year's popsicle stick stained grey from winter. Here and there were tall spindly weeds with a rank smell, and tiny white specks, with tinier yellow centers, for flowers. The only other thing that grew here was camomile.
You were alone and secret in this place, even if it was blazing noon out in the street. Above you, washing flapped in the breeze, and sometimes something wet and clammy came tumbling down through tree branches to land beside you on the muddy ground—a pair of white cotton panties you might lift gingerly on the end of a stick and heave aside. Sometimes a woman came out to bang a mop against a railing, and down floated dust bunnies, dreamy as snow. Out of open kitchen windows came the sounds and smells of other people's houses: a baby crying, a radio playing, the whine of a vacuum cleaner, a mother singing or scolding, clatter of cutlery, smell of tomato soup, smell of floorwax.
Sometimes I think my love of cities is actually the love of such small, enclosed spaces, glimpsed from bus windows, from other people's balconies, through dusty screen doors: spaces that breathe a promise which has no words but can be heard in the wind that rises before the first summer thunderstorm, or in the first night rains of early spring. Spaces that make a harmony out of an old tree trunk, grey wooden sheds and stairways slanting between walls of buildings, a balcony rail graced with geraniums, a line of washing, a black iron spiral of fire escape, the dance of leaf shadows on a red brick wall. Sometimes a squirrel, a cat—the ambiance of cats, their musk in the sparse weeds at the base of the presiding tree. These spaces are cool and dank, they are shafts, well-like, in which—one can sense—the pull of generations has been caught forever in an eddy, to swirl there like a movement of air, like a silent chord, born again and again out of its own echo.
One glimpses these spaces in passing but does not enter them. Only a child, alone, may play there, singing a private song, squatting under the fire escape and scraping at the dirt with half of a broken clothes-peg to uncover sacred relics: a blackened penny; a scratched marble; pieces of blue glass, of green glass; a rubber wheel off a Dinky toy, or maybe the hollow body of the truck itself, packed tight with claylike mud; Coke bottle caps, caked with the same mud; a large button, a small button, their holes mud-plugged; an orphaned earring; a key that will open nothing.
Lore Segal
Other People's Houses
Professor of English, Ohio State University
The secret I want to talk about is the geography of my first bedroom.
My first bedroom coincided with the Herrenzimmer, the "gentlemen's room" as the family living room used to be called in prewar Vienna. Here, come nighttime, my mother opened my little bed and she and my father retired through the door located at the foot of the bed into the dining room behind the right wall. I could hear the mumble of the conversation grownups have, after the children are got out of the way, about things grown-up people know.
In May 1938 the Nazis requisitioned our Vienna apartment. The most interesting thing, sometimes, about a memory is the stubborn impossibility of filling in the holes in it: I can see the alien uniforms standing around our Herrenzimmer. I know there were more than one but not how many, nor do I see myself, or where I stood, though I sense my father like the unseen dream presence behind a dreamer's back. I do see my mother. She is standing to my left. I was ten years old. The time had come for me to learn that what the grownups didn't know was how to save me, that they didn't know how to save themselves.
My parents and I took the train to the village of Fisch amend and went to live with my grandparents. In August, the Nazis requisitioned my grandparents' Fischamend house, and my grandparents, my parents, and I got back on the train to Vienna. We lived with aunts, cousins, and friends—whoever had room—until we were able to leave Vienna on our thirteen-year migration via England and the Dominican Republic to New York. I put it all down in a novel I called Other People's Houses. I wonder if the Ancient Mariner in his latter days got really tired of rehearsing his old trauma. Every story I tell starts, willy-nilly, with this ur-story.
I returned in 1968 with my American husband. The stairs of a Viennese prewar apartment building spiral round the central elevator in its wrought-iron cage. On the second floor I said, "There: Number 9. That's our door. Number 10 was Xaverl. At least my mother called him Xaverl. He had sinus trouble and my mother said you could set your clock by Xaverl's early morning coughing, honking, and spitting."
"What are you going to do?" asked my husband uncomfortably.
I rang the bell of Number 9: the sound of a Vienna door bell.
"What are you going to say?" asked my husband.
"Boring!" I remember thinking of Alain Robbe-Grillet's new wave novel because instead of using metaphors and similes to describe a habitation in colors, shapes, smells, and histories, he related the front porch in measurements, width by length, and the plantation of trees visible from the porch in terms of metric distances and compass directions.
I've come to think Robbe-Grillet was on to something. What do we bring away from our nostalgic—our so curiously, so helplessly urgent pilgrimages to a past long since refurnished with the colors, shapes, and smells of the histories of the new people living in our old childhoods? We confirm the blueprint plus elevation of our first geographies. And what if they've removed the walls? In an essay called "The Mural" I've described how my husband and I rented a car to Fischamend and crossed the village square toward the oversized father/mother/child painted on the building that housed the new police station which replaces my grandparents' house. "What puzzles the imagination," I wrote, "is the inability to reconstruct the spaces in which we had moved: I can't position the window that overlooked the square in the wall at the right distance from the angle of the door there used to be on the left." They had removed the floor I stood on.
With my ear inches from the door of our Vienna apartment, I was intensely excited to discover I knew that when the door opened I would see, directly across the foyer, the door to the little toilet I refused to go into, nights, when it was infested with ordinary robbers. To the left, I told my husband, is the kitchen and beyond the kitchen the miserably narrow maid's room my mother had regretted in her refugee days when she was maid and cook in an English household. Listen: the slippers slurping across the parquet floor toward us from the night are coming out of my parents' bedroom, past the bathroom door and along the wall where the little wardrobe with my clothes used to stand. They're turning the L of the foyer past the door with the glass inset that leads into the Herren zimmer. I mapped the Herrenzimmer in the air. Here's the window. Here are the three leather armchairs around the round table, here's the glass-fronted bookcase, the tile stove, door into the foyer, door into the dining room. My bed stood right here.
The chain on the inside stopped the door from opening. In my mind's hindsight it is Hansel and Gretel's crooked, beak-nosed witch peering through the crack. She asked me what I wanted and I asked for my father. She said there was nobody by that name living there. I knew that. My father had died a quarter of a century before during the week that ended the European war. The elderly witch who was living in my Vienna apartment suggested I go and talk to the concierge and then she shut the door.
I have polled my friends. Put yourself back into your first bedroom. Lie down on the bed: You know which way your feet point and the position of the window in relation to the door in relation to the chest of drawers, and the direction of the room in which your parents are asleep. Did you know that you have this map in your head? My friends are surprised, but not overly interested. Boring. We're not excited by the elemental fact that we carry our heads north of our feet, yet this is our basic orientation: it determines what we call up and down, what we experience asright and left. It's not something, when we're talking together, that we mention to ourselves or to each other. We take it, or would take it, if it so much as occurred to us, that this is what we have in common. But neither do we account to ourselves or to each other for the place in which we stand—the standpoint—from which we do our talking.
The kids have a bit of slang that gets near to what I mean. "I know where you're coming from," they say. Or "You see where I'm coming from?"
No, I don't know. I don't see, and neither do you, and that's why the things we tell each other seldom achieve direct hits. What we mean is likely to land, if it lands at all, to the right or left or aslant of what we intended. Ask someone to quote back to you what you just said. Do you recognize yourself? Proust put it best. He said when A and B talk there are four conversations—what A says and what B hears and what B says and what A hears.
It's the secret of our ur-geographies that poets and people of that sort never stop trying to give away; it's into each other's earliest space that lovers, in their first weeks, believe they are going to be able to enter.
David Shields
Dead Languages
Professor of English, University of Washington
I recently went by myself to ring the doorbell of my childhood home in the Griffith Park section of Los Angeles, and no one answered, so I looked around a little outside. The brick wall was gone, the garage was replaced by a deck out back, and the living room appeared to have been turned into a wet bar. Incense burned out open windows. What was once a white and lower-middle class neighborhood was now integrated and middle class. I could remember only a few things about the house in which I lived the first six years of my life: between the front lawn and the front porch, the brick wall which served as an ideal backstop for whiffleball games; an extraordinarily cozy living-room couch on which I would lie and watch Lassie and apply a heating pad to relieve my thunderous earaches; the red record player in my sister Sarah's room; and the wooden rocking horse in mine. . . .
I'd hold the strap attached to his ears and mouth, lifting myself onto the leather saddle. One glass eye shone out of the right side of his head; its mouth, once bright-red and smiling, had chipped away to an unpainted pout. His nose, too, was bruised, with gashes for nostrils. He had a brown mane which, extending from the crown of his head nearly to its waist, was made up of my grandmother's discarded wigs glued to the wood. Wrapping the reins around my fist, I'd slip my feet into the stirrups that hung from his waist. I'd bounce up and down to set the runner skidding across the floor. Then I'd sit up, lean forward, press my lips to the back of his neck, and exhort him. Infantile, naive, I thought I could talk to wooden animals. I'd wrap my arms around his neck and kick my legs back and forth in the stirrups. I'd lay my cheek against the side of his head, press myself to his curves. When he pitched forward, I'd scoot up toward the base of his spine, and when he swung back I'd let go of his leather strap and lean back as far as I could, so I was causing his motions at the same time as I was trying to get in rhythm with them. I'd clutch him, make him lurch crazily toward the far wall, jerking my body forward, squeezing my knees into wood. Then I'd twist my hips and bounce until it felt warm up under me, bump up against the smooth surface of the seat until my whole body tingled. I'd buck back and forth until it hurt, in a way, and I could ride no longer. Who would have guessed? My very first memory is of myself, in my own room, surrounded by sunlight, trying to get off.
Tobin Siebers
Among Men
Professor of English, University of Michigan
I owe to the army shovel an intimacy with red clay. Designed small enough to be packed by a GI, it was still big for a boy to carry any distance, though lighter than the garden spade. But it was perfect for the close work of tunneling, and so in the summer of my fifth-grade year my little brother and I equipped ourselves at the local army surplus store and set to work on the cliff of red clay overlooking the Fox River behind our house in Wisconsin.
"It's just like the modeling clay at home," Robby said, "only dried up."
"Only dried up," I agreed, forcing the edge of my shovel into the ridge of red clay.
We carved a hidden fort in the hillside, burrowing deep into the ground, chipping out the brittle clay—rubble of red cubes—until we found ourselves in complete shadow on a sunny day. We washed down the walls of the cave with water from the Fox, until the clay grew slick and smooth, and when it hardened we took up residence inside a secret organ of the earth. Dark and warm and red, it was our shelter from grown-ups and a treasure trove of mud—the "Clay Mine," we called it.
Over the next weeks we snaked deeper and more dangerously into the hillside, conversing with glee about cave-ins, avalanches, and tremblings of the earth. I sank an air shaft down from above, three feet in length, and carved a hearth at its base, where tiny bodies huddled around a fire big enough to bring a solitary can of chicken noodle soup to a boil. My brother had his first cigarette in the Clay Mine—Camel unfiltered—pilfered from our father's supplies. On the package, behind the golden camel, was the great pyramid of Egypt—grander, I felt, but not more ingenious than our own digging.
Our success with the Clay Mine sparked an enthusiasm for building, and we moved into the open where the adults might catch us. We crawled up the hillside, rose out of the shadow of sumac and wild grape vines, and laid claim to the glorious hilltop. We axed young birch trees, five inches in diameter, spent an hour strapping them together, and launched a footbridge across the drainage creek at the base of the ravine. Another set of logs, laced together with pink plastic clothesline rope, was to be our raft, but the rope unraveled and the logs broke apart the instant we hit the water. We nailed up a platform between the three trunks of an old basswood tree and strung a network of flashlight bulbs sparked by a dry-cell battery through the upper limbs as if it were Christmas.
Then one day we found ourselves up the tree and face to face with old man Sager—a hermit, miser, and notorious grouch who owned all the land stretching from our street to the river and screamed at any child who dared step foot on his property. He looked at us hard, smiled crookedly, and disappeared over the hill.
"Guess we're pretty lucky," I said.
Robby climbed down the tree and ran home in a hurry.
The next day I could see right away that things were bad in the woods. The tree house was gone. Someone had attacked it under cover of darkness, snapping each little light bulb with his fingers and flinging the timber down the hill onto the railroad tracks. Then he had chopped the footbridge in two with a hatchet. The logs rotted in the creek for years until they finally dislodged and floated away. We ran up the crest of the hill and down to the Clay Mine, but when we arrived, its roof was caved in, the opening rim broken in an arc, as if it were the Coliseum tipped on its side.
That night we told our father what old man Sager had done. Dad asked again about the light bulbs.
"Not him," he said. "Other boys."
The next morning as we were riding our bikes up and down the street, Scotty, a neighbor boy, yelled out, "Sorry about the Clay Mine," and ran back into his house. Robby turned his bike around and stared at me. I stared back. So Dad was right.
Children hide themselves instinctively from adults, as if from a natural enemy, but they need to hide themselves equally from other children who turn adult-like in their envy when confronted by the small things their friends have made. The Clay Mine fell to this envy of secrets, and we didn't have the heart to remake it because we knew, somehow, we could never keep it safe from the other children.
David Small
Imogene's Antlers (among 26 picture books)
Illustrator, The New Yorker
I came in through a narrow hall with two U-turns in it; at each turn the light diminished sharply. Rounding the second turn, like entering a cave, I stepped into total blackness. The dark was filled with the sound of gushing, gurgling water, also slammings, thumpings, and other noises hard to identify.
Gradually my eyes adjusted and forms began to appear, everything lit with a ruby glow. To my left were stainless steel tanks of water, a bubbling black bath whose rippled surface writhed with snakes of red light. Tall figures toiled along the long counter beneath the red-tinted safety bulbs. X-ray films were removed from their metal cases, developed, rinsed, and transferred to drying racks. The technicians who worked in there—because I was a doctor's son—welcomed me in to this dark interior world. With their military buzz-cuts and strong arms they looked to me like the capable, squared-off young men shown in magazine ads for the Bright and Shining Future coming soon to everybody in America. Feeling invisible in the dark, I eavesdropped on their banter and, from them, caught on to the rough camaraderie between men. This was 1951. I was six.
Listening, I dangled my hands in the water, watching the red serpents coil around my wrists, feeling a delicious deadly chill creep all the way up to my elbows.
Cathy Song
School Figures
Picture Bride (Yale Younger Poet Award)
I was born to sing. This fact had less to do with gift or talent than simply being a birthright I exercised early on despite having been born without the necessary physical apparatus required of even halfway decent singers. Had I been blessed with exceptional equipment I may have chosen to enter the entertainment business, and in doing so, forgotten my birthright. I may have ended up an entertainer, singing background music for others to dine by. The shadow world abounds in talented entertainers.
In the company of others I was too shy to sing; no one had heard my true voice. In the company of others I remained for the most part quiet, quiescent, as if waiting to sing to life.
I was born to sing despite a lung capacity that was never strong, even before years of bad habits like smoking ruined it forever. And though I possessed a sensitive ear (my voice recognition is uncanny), my pitch like my balance was wobbly, unsure, never quite able to hover precisely above the notes the way a dancer floats above her feet by focusing on the abdomen, her center. I would struggle, slide up to the notes, swallow a few, and then release a warble. Oh, but my heart was in it! I could move myself to tears at my own rendition of "Danny Boy" and "Red River Valley," the beloved ballads my untrained singing retreated to when I wanted to be alone. Just how alone I wanted to be became more apparent the older I grew. It wasn't that I just wanted everyone out of the house; I wanted to be alone even when the house was empty. Alone to be myself. Not the self who had to negotiate her way through the daily ritual of social interaction and responsibility appropriate to her everyday reality, which as an adolescent meant adhering to authority, teachers and parents, as well as conformity, the changing whims of frivolous friendships. That self came away exhausted, pummeled by the forces that conspired to keep me from myself. I suppose I longed to be task-less. I longed to simply be.
Perhaps in another life I had been a monk who sat for eternity and chanted, shrouded in a halo of sound, pure sound where the text is secondary to the sacred vibrations spinning within every cell, every cell waiting to hum its part in the intricate workings of the universe. So my ancestors did not come from Ireland or the American West. This fact had everything to do with these two songs. They served as templates for my humble voice to reproduce for my own benefit sounds as sacred as any sutra.
When my own children were young, I used to dream of a break in the tedious hours devoted to their care, as if praying for a break in the weather, the long still afternoons when only flies answered at the screen door. Frequent naps were a requirement in our household during the years before the arrival of school relieved me so I could catch up, not on much needed sleep or long neglected housework, but rather so I could catch up on myself. A habit begun long before I had my own children, when I was still a child myself yet old enough to stay home without supervision. How introverted and uncooperative I must have appeared to my parents, who set out on countless family expeditions without me, asking one last time as they pulled out of the driveway, "Sure you don't want to come along?"
I did not want to come along; so much of living as I saw it meant keeping occupied, filling in the gaps between the major events of eating and sleeping. Already then I feared time was being gobbled up and frittered away by amusements invented by someone else. I did not want to tag along. How could I tell them gently in a way they could understand that I preferred my own company, that I enjoyed being alone? I tried not to appear too gleeful, solemnly pronouncing I had work to do—work, a word my parents approved of, bought me liberation. Of course, if I had work to do I was allowed to stay behind. Indeed, it was work that required my fullest attention. Once they drove off, I would race back into the house, not a minute to spare, sit in the middle of the blessedly empty house and sing. "Danny Boy" and "Red River Valley," my two standbys, served as warm-up, preludes to some new song I wanted to practice, the choice often depending upon finding to my delight one with a suitable range. Around the age of thirteen I discovered the epiphanies of Joan Baez's hymnal interpretation of Bob Dylan's "I Shall be Released," Judy Collins's cold spring surges of "My Father," and Joni Mitchell's sad inflections on "Both Sides Now." I heard in their voices courage, each breath a commitment to give each moment fullest attention, and I responded, something within me unfurling, lifting, turning toward the light.
In singing I found my true voice, a resonance that began deep within my body, and once engaged, encouraged my entire being to expand beyond the confines of my limitations. I found true power residing there, the pouring in of something larger than my own breath and the resultant sound, a boundlessness, reverberating, radiating, shining forth. It was like dipping into an ongoing eternal river and emerging anew, revived. My entire being would heat up as the conscious production of sound began to accelerate an awareness of my own body, not the boundaries of the subservient one fulfilling the necessities of utilitarian existence, but the other body, the secret one whose skin is composed of light.
Sometimes the singing stopped, sometimes for years, and I would return to it from a long absence, hesitantly, afraid I might find I had lost my way. Though at first my voice would be rusty from disuse, it would, with a little coaxing, respond with such forgiveness that I would be moved to believe in the generosity of this gift that required no talent, that needed no explanation for my lapses, as if it knew only too well about those things, those obstacles and distractions that tie us down, keep us from ourselves, making us so busy, too busy to sing.
Ellen Handler Spitz
Inside Picture Books
Lecturer, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
Words shaped the secret spaces of my childhood. From the start they mattered—even before I knew what they meant. My mother made certain of that. Our family legend has it that frosty mornings on New York's Upper West Side in Riverside Park a bundled-up baby girl in fur-trimmed hood, harnessed to an oversized perambulator, astonished passers-by with impromptu renditions of the Preamble to the United States Constitution. At bedtime, my mother sat close to me on a satin coverlet and read aloud. Poetry often, not just stories, and I waited for the effect of her voice. Modulated and mellifluous, it filled me with sounds, images, and wistful longings. It made me sad and happy all at once. Even now, reading stories to young children makes me cry. My daughter, when she was small, cast furtive glances at me during especially long pauses in my reading—the silences that gave me away.
Lying perfectly still beside my mother with her voice in my ears, I floated off to lands where pastel-colored gumdrops cascaded from silvery trees, and turreted stone castles rose out of landscapes carpeted in the deepest of green. Witches cackled and grimaced; shy boys gave knitted caps to princesses. Ogres menaced me with gaping mouths and guttural roars; stalwart toy soldiers perished, their paper hats askew. Flowers with human faces erupted into bursts of tinkling laughter; rocking horses teased their riders; a delicate lady in black rescued an elephant who had lost its mother. Rhinoceroses on the banks of gray-green greasy rivers unbuttoned their heavy skins; a woman gave birth to a mouse. I shivered when Carrabbas the uninvited fairy cast her hundred-year spell and tasted the drops of blood that fell from Sleeping Beauty's finger. Envious and lonely, I longed to be cared for, like the Darling children, by a furry Nana or to have a fairy godmother or a turbaned genie of my own.
Speak clearly and distinctly, my mother repeated, as we grew taller and began to play with other children who didn't. Whenever you open your mouth, the world is waiting to judge you. Never be imprecise. In our house, some words were strictly forbidden. "Thing," for example. If my sister or I forgot and carelessly resorted to it, Mother would stare at the offender and shake her head slowly, knitting her brows in pretend confusion: "What did I hear? You must say exactly what you mean." One day my mouth opened, and an unknown word flew out, syllables I had heard uttered by another child. Her edict came swiftly: were I ever to use that word again, my mouth would be washed out with soap. Looking back, I cannot remember what word it was or whether the threat was actually carried out, but a bitter taste remains, a gagging sensation, a feeling of rage at being held down, a profound sense of humiliation.
At eight years of age, I was sent off to summer camp in the Berkshires, where all the other girls in my bunk gathered in clusters, their hands cupped, whispering a word I did not know. Desperately, I tried to decipher its meaning from context but couldn't. All summer long, the hovering presence of this word oppressed me; I felt miserably left out, too ashamed to reveal my ignorance. Colorful, wild fantasies haunted my imagination until, back in New York, I began to circle my mother. Waiting for just the right moment to ask her, my heart beat loudly, but in the end my courage failed. The word I hadn't known was "Kotex."
Words determined my childhood loves. Nathan, for example, was my father's oldest brother and my favorite uncle. I begged to be allowed to sit next to him because of his prodigious vocabulary. He specialized in arcane polysyllabic words and was fond of quoting world literature as he launched into complex stories with Homeric flourishes. He never talked down to me. After dinner, he indulged himself with aromatic cigars, and traces of their scent clung to his scratchy tweeds. When my direct gaze met his, he responded with a knowing twinkle. Seated beside him, I felt enveloped not only by his wonderful words but by his bulk, his aroma, and my primitive realization that he was, because of his linguistic gifts, a font of limitless mental adventure.
My second favorite was Uncle Phil, born in England. He had an oddly sharp way of pronouncing words that delighted me. Taking my beribboned sister on one of his knees and myself on the other, he regaled us after dinner with cunningly crafted renditions of the great European fairy tales. Especially thrilling was his telling of "Rumpelstiltskin." Astonishingly inventive, he could make the terrified queen guess dozens of names, each more exotic than the last. Streams of names seemed to pour effortlessly from his lips until finally in the end when the dwarf simply has to be recognized by the queen, he would pronounce "RUMPELSTILTSKIN" in stentorian tones and let go suddenly, dropping us two small girls from his knees to the floor below, where we collapsed in a heap only to plead for a repeat performance.
Occasionally our parents went out in the evening, and just after they left, I would run to my room. Creeping under my bed with a cache of picture books, I would try to remain there for as long as I could, stretched out in my secret hiding place. Inevitably, the irregular tapping of our sitter's footsteps disrupted my solitude, warning me that my sanctuary was about to be invaded.
Not long afterwards, I developed the habit of running away. From home, from school, and eventually from summer camp. When interrogated and punished, I was unable to explain myself. The best I could do was try to refrain from using another word Mother had prohibited, namely, hate. "I hate you" was what I longed to say—to teachers, to counselors, and even to her. She did not allow this because, as she explained, the world was still recovering from a war in which hate had caused the murder of millions of innocent victims. To me, however, a child whose hands and face never came perfectly clean, whose long tangled hair resisted brushing, whose demeanor was insufficiently sedate and mood inexplicably sullen, the word hate made sense. So sometimes I transgressed and did utter the terrible word. It seethed on my lips, and afterwards produced shame and a renewed impulse to run away.
At eleven, I was terrifed of the male gym teacher at Murray Avenue School in Larchmont, where, just before his presence in my life became a reason for escape, my parents had purchased a Tudor-style manor house with leaded windows, majestic twin fir trees under which I could hide, and five lovely bathrooms including one I did not have to share with my sister. The move disoriented me. After apartment living, the new house seemed overwhelming. I fantasized secret passages and was afraid of getting lost. School intimidated me as well. Especially the other girls. Whereas Mother dressed me in plaid pinafores and jumpers with knee socks and matching ribbons for my braids, the Larchmont girls wore nylon stockings, shoes they called "flats," slips they called "crinolines," "cinch belts" for their waists, and dresses more grown-up than anything that hung in my closet. With his megaphone to his mouth, surly Mr. Smith dominated the school playing field in a ranting voice that blended with the guttural harangues of my childhood ogres ("fee-fi-fo-fum . . ."). Anything I could do to avoid him was acceptable to me. Small and new in sixth grade, the year when everyone's body is changing at a different rate, I felt ashamed to be scrutinized in my regulation green gym suit, ashamed to be chosen last for every sports team, ashamed above all to be bellowed at. Thus, a pattern developed.
Each day of gym class, I descended to the breakfast room for my bowl of hot cereal and then dashed off to school. But instead of going to school, I doubled back. Gingerly and furtively, I climbed down into one of those leaf-filled wells that surround the windows of basements. Fortunately, our maid had the habit of leaving at least one window ajar to air out the laundry, and reaching with my small fingers I could unlatch the bar and squeeze myself through. Tiptoeing to the tiny bathroom on that floor, I silently slipped the bolt and locked myself in. It was cold enough for me to keep my coat on. Curling into a ball between the toilet bowl and sink, I pulled out a book from my bag and settled down to read. Magical hours passed as I flew off to other times and spaces.
Mother however still thought me too young for a wristwatch, and so my anxiety over whether the maid might divulge my secret was trumped by a more urgent concern—namely that, lost in a book I might fail to reappear at just the right time for lunch. Knowing when to stop reading and retrace my steps—when to climb back out of the window and pretend to come home from school—was an insoluble problem. Eventually, I was caught and chastised. "Dire consequences," as Mother put it, were the fruits of misbehavior.
One other scene of clandestine activity took place that year in a turreted house that belonged to my friend Mary Lennon's family. A trapdoor to their attic was located in Mary's own bedroom. In addition, she and her siblings were the possessors of massive stacks of comic books, including the so-called classic comics which I adored but was forbidden to read. Mary herself, moreover, had vowed to protect me, even if it meant lying occasionally on my behalf. For Mother despised comic books; whereas other children spent their weekly allowances on them, my sister and I had none.
Rebelliously, I marched weekdays to the Lennons' imposing house. Mary and I, our hair done in braids for school, would smile knowingly as the heavy oaken doors opened and closed. Once upstairs in her bedroom, we silently released the folding stair that led to a dark attic and then, equipped with flashlights and laden with our comic book treasure, we ascended. How delicious it was there amidst the dank odors and eerie shadows we cast! Never will I forget my terror when Milady, in the classic comics version of Dumas's Three Musketeers, was to be beheaded. The silhouette of her hooded executioner still haunts my dreams, for I felt myself to be guilty, like her, of wrongdoing.
Mother died before my sister and I had fully grown up. It has been decades since we've heard her voice. She died too young to read anything I ever published, too young to grasp the immense expanding impact of her words. But one granddaughter of hers teaches English now in China and carries on the family tradition of surrendering to words and to all the faraway places, real and fantasized, to which they lead. This granddaughter has a way too of glancing at me when I fall silent. Ever watchful, she still expects, perhaps, to detect a tear.
Ilan Stavans
The Hispanic Condition
Professor of Spanish, Amherst College
Not far from my house in Copilco, the southern neighborhood in Mexico's capital where I grew up, there was a factory in ruins—its name, La Curtidora, still decipherable on top of its entry door. It was a roofless structure with decrepit walls that invoked London after World War II but far more humid. It was magical, full of secret alleyways, treacherous dead-ends, and undiscovered chambers. Heavy rain multiplied its ubiquitous puddles. It is those puddles that I first think of when La Curtidora comes to mind because my brother and I enjoyed catching tadpoles and frogs, which we would bring home in old marmalade bottles with tops full of holes for the tadpoles to breathe. The puddles, and the factory as a whole, seemed like a Darwinian wonderland to me: micro-organisms reproducing at amazing speed and rivalries between breeds playing themselves in front of my eyes. In spite of it being in urban surroundings, I sensed I was in an alternative reality: a rustic, unfinished site suspended in Time.
My all-time favorite place within it was an abandoned school bus—flat tires, broken seats, rusted roof, wild plants growing through the windows, but with its windshield intact. When my brother wasn't around, I usually ended up in one of its back seats, making sketches of unreachable planets in a notebook. Later on, in my adolescence, it was in the bus that a friend and I meticulously studied wrinkled copies of Playboy, but those images are less meaningful to me than the comforting solitude I found before, when I sat undisturbed in it. What made the bus so attractive, so stimulating? I often envisioned the children that used it decades ago—their faces, their words, their aura was vivid to me. I felt them around, like ghosts, speaking to one another, exchanging cards or sharing lunch items while navigating the daily route. Did anyone ever kiss for the first time in the site I was? Did any one of these children imagine it to be a spaceship too? Around then my mother got me a book called Un automóvil llamado Julia, written originally in German—in Spanish, the title means An Automobile CalledJulia—, about a pair of children that find a chatarra, a useless motorcar left untouched in a barn. They clean it, fix the engine, remodel its interior, and little by little transform it into a brand new vehicle. (It was exactly the premise of the musical film Chitty ChittyBang Bang, which I saw many times.)
The plot enthralled and inspired me. What if I too transformed the school bus into an appetizing item? I went to a hardware store and with the few pesos I had in my piggy bank bought brushes and paint and decided to make the effort. While doing so, I thought that perhaps, after I finished with the bus, my next project could involve asking a few neighbors to help me rebuild one of the chambers of La Curtidora—plaster the walls, rebuild the roof, set new floor tiles. But first I had to finish with el autobús llamado. . . . Halfway through the job, though, the results already quite inviting, I was overwhelmed by second thoughts. Why should I turn my favorite site into a place others would want for themselves? What I most liked about the bus, about the factory, was precisely their "unappetizing" quality, the fact that they were mine alone. Why make my private hideout public? So I stopped inmedias res.
La Curtidora became a casualty of the voracious modernity of the mid-1970s, a decade in which Mexico City, like an octopus, extended its tentacles far and wide to devour everything around it. In its stead a huge building complex was erected. The last recollection I nurture of the bus is of its interior half painted in an emphatic yellow.
John R. Stilgoe
Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places
Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape, Harvard University
Just south of the hen house, the gravel bank tumbled down toward the logged-over maple swamp and the lone white pine at its edge. Thousands of maple saplings stymied any casual exploration of Valley Swamp and while I could walk barefoot and soaked to Jacobs Pond, Third Herring Brook, and salt water, I never did. The saplings blocked any long-distance views from the bulldozer-sculpted gravel bank too, making the swamp visually opaque, mysterious. I liked to look at the swamp, even if I could not look far into it.
Before age ten I had a sort of observation spot on the bank, an oval of bare gravel surrounded by sweet fern and bayberry and sheltered from the northeast wind by the hen house. Active play happened just to the east in a zone of toy soldiers, steel Tonka trucks, and Michigan cranes, even an eight-foot-diameter concrete pond my parents built for toy boats. Small white pines and cedars punctuated that end of the bank and long before any high school teacher explained ecological succession I knew it firsthand. Year after year the bank greenery grew more dense, and by the time I reached my teens only the sweet-fern-encircled gravel spot remained bare. I spent a lot of time in it, but always in brief fragments, sitting or sprawled, watching the swamp or gazing at the sky, gauging the weather, then heading elsewhere. Never did I read in it. Instead I sort of floated my senses, filament-like, always in part because the sweet fern smelled.
Sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina) is not a fern, but one of the bayberry family, and its lustrous fernlike leaves prove wonderfully aromatic, especially on a hot day. The smell floats several feet from the plants, and crushing the leaves between the fingers means scenting them for hours. I put a few sweet fern leaves in my elementary-school pencil box, and sometimes in my windbreaker pockets. Some school years I shoved one or two leaves into the back corner of my desk, so I could touch them, pull out my hand, and smell the smell of home. I did not hate school, but I disliked its indoor regimen, its emphasis on knowing by seeing and listening only. Never did I buy a school lunch. My lunchbox tastes connected me with home at midday, but sometimes as the hours dragged I needed the faint odor of sweet fern too, to remind me of the gravel bank, the swamp, the joyousness of nothing to do. When I happened on the idea of putting the leaves in books I cannot recall, but I remember inserting sweet fern leaves in junior-high-school math books. Smelling the leaves made me glimpse the swamp, put me back in my spot for an instant, rescued me momentarily from Modern Math.
In cold weather or warm, the spot focused my senses, indeed reassured me of their value. In mid-spring and mid-autumn I heard migrating birds, the rush of wind through the maples, the slicing of rain. Mid-summer meant smelling the swamp as it dried, meant measuring the dusky odor of hot maples underlying the scent of sweet fern or noting the smells that presaged a thunderstorm. Hot days meant grading the different consistencies of gravel under my bare back or between my fingers. Any season, even winter, rewarded any visual scrutiny of the swamp, or the sweet fern leaves curled up, withered and russet brown, mere shadows against the cold, the snow. What I learned surrounded by sweet fern is only the old rural Yankee way of meditating, the quiet time everyone once valued. On the gravel bank I discovered the inestimable value of down time, of just being, of the way particular aromas waft through all sorts of mental jumble, the moments that make one distinguish between busyness and business, school and education.
Stephen Trimble
The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (with Gary Nabhan)
The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin
When I was boy, and Ike was president, Little America meant freedom. It wasn't Richard Byrd's Little America, the polar explorer's 1929 Antarctic outpost. My Little America was Covey's Little America, the world's largest gas station, hunkered low against windscour and winterblast on the rim of an eroding Wyoming mesa.
These summers of my childhood reeled out as adventures, their rhythms dictated by my father's fieldwork as a geologist. When school ended each spring, we left our home in Denver and drove west through Wyoming to Oregon or Idaho. In these outposts of home—home because we were together—we rented a house in the town closest to my father's mapping area.
This run of the open-space West stretched as wide as the Cinerama screens in its cities, out to the limits of peripheral vision, where it kept going. When something happened in that emptiness—a dust storm, a rainbow, a fleet of pronghorn dashing across the road so close I always imagined them actually leaping over the hood—it made my day. My mother and I joked about the emptiness. We would croon, "Why-O-Why, Wyoming," and dissolve in giggles. A city girl, she was fond of the place name that epitomized Hicksville for her: Tie Siding, Wyoming.
We began to see signs along U.S. 30 outside of Laramie. "Little America." "World's Largest Gas Station." "65 pumps." "Nickel ice cream cones." Black-and-white cartoon penguins and Fifties signboard cursive led us to the faux-colonial buildings topping a rise west of Rock Springs. Here, one day's comfortable travel northwest of Denver, we stopped for the night at the motel and truck stop punctuating the windy middle of nowhere.
Covey was the founder of the place, a visionary whose story was printed on every placemat in the restaurant. "Away back in the Nineties, when I was ayoungster herding sheep in this dreary section of Wyoming, I was forced to lieout in a raging blizzard. . . ." On that stormy night, Covey dreamed of surviving to build a haven for travelers in the remote spot. When he heard about Admiral Byrd's base in Antarctica, he knew what he would call his traveler's rest.
His dream—Little America, Wyoming—opened for business in 1934. On these long-ago evenings at Little America, we gratefully took our key to one of the modest red brick units. When we pushed open the door, I was gleeful to be out of the car and in this room with chenille-covered beds set close enough for a boy to somersault across the gap between them. We showered off the sweat that came from driving before air conditioning, with the windows open and my parents still smoking. We walked to the dining room where smiling, elderly Alice Hand played bouncy tunes on an electric organ. With a switch, she flipped on a fake drum accompaniment, beaming with pleasure at this whiz-bang technology.
We rejoiced in our family intimacy. Surely no one understood as we did the humor in Covey's self-conscious "Legend of Little America" printed on the placemats. We smirked at each other when Alice Hand played her un-hip music, just as we joked about Lawrence Welk, my grandmother's equally un-hip hero. But, the truth is, I didn't have to look up Alice's name to write this. I remember it, and I remember her benign smile, a benediction bestowed on anyone with the means to sit in those brass-studded leatherette armchairs and pay for their spaghetti with its slightly acidic sauce, for their hamburgers and steak and fried shrimp and soft dinner rolls.
While my parents stopped at the bar for their before-dinner gin and tonics, and again, the next morning, as they lingered over coffee, they freed me to wander around Little America, exploring. Everything about the place seemed a little askew: a gleaming shield of tile in the restaurant bathroom, otherworldly green; in the gift shop, a stuffed penguin in a glass case. The penguin stood sentry over bins of knick-knacks. Rabbit's-foot keychains. Ceramic jackalopes. Pastel felt fedoras with "Little America" stitched on the brims. I coveted them, every one.
There were fireworks, too—illegal at home, but legal in Wyoming, and therefore mesmerizing. Cracker balls were my weapons of choice, the little wads of brightly colored paper and gunpowder you winged at the pavement for a satisfying explosion. I used up my allowance on the cracker balls and used up the balls one by one on the oil-stained cement curbs.
I counted the gas pumps, wondering if this really was the world's largest service station. For my tally of license plates from different states, I censused the parking lot, pen and notebook in hand. I remember wrestling with a minor moral dilemma: could I check off more than one state for a single vehicle, using the semi-trucks registered in several places?
Most of all, I remember walking to the edge of the vast parking pads, where cement ended abruptly at the brink of what the awestruck ranchers in western movies of the time called "Big Country." From this frontier of the mid-twentieth century, I stared into the empty red-desert scrubland, into the tantalizing space of Wyoming, squinting up Black's Fork toward Fort Bridger, shrinking under too much sky, dreaming of mountain men.
These dreams stay with me. In the time-travel parlor game, where you pick any time and place to visit, I choose the West of my imagination, the West of Crow and Ute and Pueblo, of Indian America. The West of those exquisite, terrifying Blackfoot warriors and worthy Mandan holy men in Karl Bodmer's watercolors from 1833. The West that Lewis and Clark and the trappers saw, with no roads, no towns, no resorts in the Shining Mountains. No dams on the desert rivers, no polluting roar from internal combustion engines.
Just as the mountain men escaped from the civilized East, my father's field seasons for the U.S. Geological Survey furnished an escape for the three of us. From the sorrow of the family tragedy—my retarded older brother, swept away by schizophrenia at puberty, institutionalized, and lost to us. Escape from the taunting of my classmates, who hazed me each school year for my bookishness and ineptitude at sports. Escape from my mother's needy sister and dismissive brother-in-law, toxic to her peace of mind. Little America was our gateway to three months of freedom.
These summers had the open-ended allure of a summer vacation heightened by the dare of being on the road. My father had been driving the West for twenty years already, and he plotted his route from mountain to mountain and restaurant to restaurant. He loved the cool rise of the peaks as much as he loved the flake and fruit of homemade berry pies. Fort Collins: Iverson's Dairy for chicken sandwiches and ice cream made from milk from cows we could see out the window. Laramie: windy, railroad-dingy, a line of motor courts with cowboy neon. Branding iron, bucking bronco, buckaroo.
And on across Wyoming, with broken-down gas stations constituting most of the towns, Red Desert, Wamsutter, Point of Rocks, Medicine Bow. Hamburgers in Sarasota, or lunch in Rawlins, at the Adams Restaurant with its special salad dressing or the steamy Willow Café, where descendants of the Chinese who followed the railroad made spaghetti for me ninety years later.
The map. A provocative array of "Points of Interest," the red squares that told me that Wyoming mattered to history, somehow. "Site of Fort Fred Steele" (who was Fred?). "Dinosaur Graveyard" (were there gravestones?). "Remains of Old Almond Stage" (why almond?).
When I turned sixteen, I ferried my mother to Little America in our 1962 Dodge Dart, an ugly pinkish-tan one-of-a-kind confrontation of curves and angles. I was determined to drive every mile of the open highway, following my father as he drove the government Jeep. I remember getting dangerously tired on those ups and downs of central Wyoming, but I sure wasn't going to yield the wheel to my mother.
When adolescence flooded me with hormones, I lay in my bed at Little America on hot summer nights obsessed with a wakening sexuality that the freedom of that first day on the road enflamed. I fantasized about being taken, ravished, by one of those businesslike waitresses, off-shift, in her cottage at the back of the parking lot. Somebody, please, somebody, take me by the hand and lead me to bed and show me how to make love.
In 1999, I again drive the familiar road across Wyoming, this time reversing the direction of my childhood venture into the freedom of summer. I journey through a February snowstorm—toward Denver, not away from it, to move my aging parents from our family home to a retirement apartment. I will gather up my rock and postcard collections and my newspaper clippings from the Sixties and drive back to my home in Salt Lake City with my childhood in boxes in the back of my truck.
And so I return to sit in the dining room at Little America for the first time in years. There is a new, gleaming, too-brilliant building next door, with fast food and high-tech gas pumps. But the old motel and its lobby and restaurant remain as I remember, unrenovated. Instead of Alice Hand at the organ, inoffensive selections of classical music play for me and for the Wyoming ranch families out for Saturday night supper on this frigid February night.
Edward Curtis prints hang in sepia on the walls—the classic romantic image of the West. Here is another dream, Indians as we want them to be, noble profiles and tragic mourners, frozen in 1880 before vanishing with the buffalo. I'm sure few travelers stopping here at Little America think of the real Shoshone and Arapahoe people of Wyoming, not exactly flourishing but proudly surviving still, struggling to keep their families intact and make a living up north on the Wind River Reservation.
I sit in the same high-backed chairs I sat in at five, at ten, at sixteen. It's disorienting to be here in this museum diorama of my childhood, writing in my journal about memories thirty and forty years old now.
It's ironic, too, that the very reason for my trip lies waiting in Denver—where I will encounter my childhood when I sift through the closets and shelves of my family home. In those boxes lie forgotten Little America post cards and keychains, snapshots of my mother and father standing on the curb here, younger than I am now.
My parents saved these things without making a judgment about their worth. They were mine. They once mattered to me. And so I'll have to be the one to decide to keep them or dump them. Many times in the decades since, I would have tossed them all. Now, I save the funkiest trinkets, some for my own children, a few to connect me to my past when I encounter them on my desk.
The storm sifts snow across the parking lot to drift against the windbreak of blue spruce. Fuchsia neon reflects from a molded green Sinclair Oil dinosaur grazing on the front lawn. Darkness settles, the ground blizzard grows more daunting. Back on the road, the semis barreling over the black ice and through the wind-driven blind of snow threaten me, a roaring force at odds with my fragile memories. I drive east, into my future and back to my childhood.
Marina Warner
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
Visiting Fellow Commoner, Trinity College, Cambridge University
Before I was sent to boarding school in England, across the Channel from my parents in Brussels, I didn't have any secrets, except the precious hoard I accumulated in my treasure drawer, which nobody else was allowed to open without my being there: a set of tiny white porcelain Chinese horses in different poses (most fascinating the one rolling on its back); a filigree brooch in the shape of a tennis racket with a pearl attached for the ball; some shiny studio portraits of stars (Leslie Caron, Howard Keel, Mel Ferrer) cut from my mother's monthly magazine from London; miniature detergent packets, plaster-of-Paris painted vegetables, and tiny scales and weights for playing toy shop; the pink frou-frou hat, complete with hat-pin, worn by my doll Jennifer, who had been given to me in a wonderful box rustling with tissue paper by my mother, in Rome when we went back to her home country for the first time; some numbers of the weekly comic Girl, and a few feathers, relics of my pet birds, bought in the Grand Place at the Sunday market. They always died because their feet fell off. (Since then, I've learned that fowlers trapped them with lime or nets that damaged their legs.)
My treasure drawer doesn't point forward to what I have become—I never liked riding or tennis. However, Girl did run on its back page a series on Heroines of History, and I've since studied and even written about several of them (Joan of Arc, Emmeline Pankhurst). But later, posted to the huge, imposing convent of St Mary's with its cobwebby pine copses and bleak playing fields, I developed a far deeper secret life. I was engulfed by a sense of being severed from everything familiar—from family and, in my case, even language; at home, in the kitchen, we spoke Italian when my father was at work, and with my friends in Belgium I spoke French, so when I first arrived at St. Mary's I appalled my new schoolfriends with my curious, unchildlike English, acquired from books and adults only. The food was strange to me as well; I couldn't penetrate the barter economy of toffee and fudge and gobstoppers and liquorice bootlaces and humbugs because I didn't know what any of these things were, as I'd never eaten English sweets. In the drab Belgium of the 1950s, children's treats were limited to marzipan sabots (clogs) on December 6, St. Nicholas's day, and bunches of lily of the valley at the beginning of May—to mention "les muguets de mai" would have set my English classmates hooting with derision.
So I built ramparts and defenses around enclaves that nobody could spoil by sarcastic mockery. These secret places hold in kernel far more of my future than the contents of my treasure drawer and yet, at the same time, the normal banality of that little girl's accumulation doesn't feel as alien to me now as the private world I fervently made up as a refuge from England.
The school day followed a rhythm set by monasticism: chapel, breakfast, study punctuated by prayers at noon (the Angelus bell sounding); lunch in the refectory, followed by a period of "recreation"; then more schoolwork (prep. for the next day's lessons); supper; more chapel (every other day); games and dancing to 45s in the school hall (this was the era of Cliff Richard's hit, "Livin' Doll"); followed by bedtime, and, if we were lucky, "My Curly-headed Baby," sung in her thrillingly big soprano voice by Mother Barbara in the dormitory. This timetable, with its long stretches of imposed tedium, its structured contrasts of activity and quiet, its punctuating rest bars and pauses, now strikes me as a genuine achievement of the Catholic faith, and its disappearance from the crammed schedules of children today a profound mistake. As Adam Phillips observes, "It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one's time." There was nothing to do during that empty, "boring" time of afternoon "recreation," for that very reason, fantasy flowed in to fill it.
The Lower School where I arrived aged nine occupied a large suburban house and garden that bordered on the purpose-built convent; a grass path led through sandy soil, where azaleas flourished; beyond these flowerbeds dark and dusty rhododendron bushes spread their angular limbs; I learned how to pull off the flowerheads, split the petals and put the tip of my tongue into the groove, like the philtrum of the upper lip, and lick the drop of nectar collected there. There were some small headstones in the bare soil under the bushes, where pets were buried—they had belonged to the house's former owners. But these discreet graves were few and gathered in one spot near the garden wall, and they didn't lead on from one part of the grounds to another, as did the images of the crucifixion and the statues of Mary that were placed at strategic moments in the garden—at the corner of the hockey field, at a meeting of two paths in the pine woods, or in the Lourdes grotto where we prayed on special feast days.
I would stare and stare into the mild, blank face of the Madonna, and will her to speak to me; with the full force of my concentration I defied her to remain an inert, wooden, painted thing. The visions of Bernadette and the children of Fatima were mixed up in my mind with the statues that replicated the very young girl who'd appeared, with roses between her toes, in the Massabielle grotto, and the radiant, floating queen who'd spoken to the three seers at Fatima and given them secrets, which, we were told conspiratorially, only the Pope had seen and wouldn't be opened for fifty years. The inert statues in the convent grounds might start vibrating with visionary light if I fixed them, like Max and the Wild Things, with my special, intense, commanding stare. I beseeched Our Lady, I implored her, I searched for her tears, her smile; I'd look away, and quickly look back to see if I could catch her moving, as in a game of Grandmother's Footsteps. She was the biggest of all possible dolls; if I could have reached to take her down from her pedestal I would have shaken her to life, like Alice and the Kitten. She wasn't a kitten, and she wasn't a doll, and up there, carved taller than any mortal woman, she was literally out of reach. But she took the leading role in my games of make-believe, and Rilke is so deep and right when, in his essay "Some Reflections on Dolls," he says, "the doll was the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which was later to come to us repeatedly out of space, whenever we approached the frontiers of our existence at any point. . . . Are we not strange creatures to let ourselves go and be induced to place our earliest affections where they remain hopeless?"
Underneath the rhododendron bushes were crawl spaces, and I found one that was roomy enough to kneel in; it must have been summer, for the ground was warm and dry, I remember. I broke off twigs from other, lesser bushes than my chosen shrine, and bent them into the tracery of the rhododendron branches in the manner of a wattle fence; I didn't have any twine and the long grasses I tried to use to tie them in place quickly dried and frayed and broke; so the walls of my hiding-place were ramshackle. But I continued to work on weaving a secure perimeter, and I felt a huge happiness and pride in the private grotto I was making—that rush of excitement that accompanies a secret.
I used to pray there fervently, that summer of my tenth or eleventh year, for the Virgin Mary to appear to me. I don't remember how I lost interest or when I gave up; a certain relief followed, as only one part of me wanted to be a saint.
Paul West
The Tent of Orange Mist
Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters
Childhood is work, requiring not only exact reporting but a willingness to discern its effects: woof and afterlife, so to speak. The first, I think, is easier in that the images have sunk in and become permanent, if remembered at all, whereas the second is open to self-persuasion and deceit, lending itself to adult embellishment and mature hyperbole. If you ponder childhood at all, you end up with an album and something like King René's Very Rich Hours, in which childhood figures as almost a character in a narrative, tilted this way and that.
I never live a minute of my adult life without thinking of my childhood. My grown-upness is drenched in childhood. The child, as Wordsworth says, is father to the man, but also the man's overseer, wizard, and catalyst. I first discovered the ambivalence of childhood when I began writing (poems) at seventeen, suddenly recognizing how the cast-iron fact could melt and redeploy itself once in the presence of willing words. There is what you mean when you say "It was like this," and what you intend when you say "It meant this to me." The two are hard to separate, but I somehow manage to do so because I have, on the one hand, a near-photographic record of what happened, and, on the other, an only too acute sense of what the imagination can do once provoked. Proust is instructive here because he stresses the way memory does not oblige. There is the voluntary memory, which can be schooled and made to serve, and there is the involuntary memory that pleases itself, goes its own way, and cannot be harnessed, only awaited, depended upon, for whatever it tosses up. I myself find this reassuring because it almost corresponds to my initial distinction between fact and embellishment; the voluntary memory will dish up whole gamuts of material, whereas the involuntary one obligates you at once to the quirkiest mystery there is—you are lucky if you have this at all, or at least some awareness of it. There are those with albums, and those with radiographic plates of a haunting. I hope to do justice to both. Suffice to say, when I reached seventeen I was much aware of recalling my childhood as something "over," done with, complete, like the literature of a dead language, but also of childhood as a gift, a fuel to the ego, a mass of mystery and joy that would somehow ballast and fortify the incipient adult. So there occurs a natural pause at that point as the mind tries to stabilize itself before delving beyond.
Meeting the Sitwells
It was rumored that if any of us in our uncouth way, presented himself at the doors of the Sitwells' Renishaw Hall, begging a penny for the Guy (effigy of the Gunpowder Plotter Guy Fawkes) or simply pleading for a leftover crust or two, or even "a drink of water, Mester," Sir Osbert or his minions would send us away calling us all Mellors, after the plebeian upstart of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, set in this very village (and one other). When I myself showed up hoping for her and not him (Dame Edith rather than Sir Osbert, the poet rather than the autobiographer), he never said Mellors at all.
"So you write, young feller-me-lad."
"Yes sir, I do. Stories."
"Ah, but not often."
"From time to time, sir."
"Thank God for that. How may I disappoint you?"
"Well, sir, I wondered—"
"I never help, I never advise, boy. Are you Jewish?"
I told him no, but I would have answered no to anything. Was I an Assyrian, Kurdish, Cypriot? I had little idea of what he meant.
"Well, good, that's a blessing. So you write. Well, don't. Whatever form the disease takes with you, resist it and get a decent job mining coal."
He hadn't even asked to see the sheaf of twaddle I'd brought with me, rolled up like certificates. He hadn't identified me as the genius I hoped I was. His own prose, like his speech, was spattered with single dashes—not dashes in pairs—and, although I thought his Left Hand, Right Hand a plausible theory of personality (the left's palmistry is the givens, the right's what you've made of them), I had never thought him a convincing theorist. I just wanted a sign from above that all was going well. I was sixteen and rather helpless. Who on earth, what prankster, had put me up to this, fessing my fetish at the portals of well-to-do aristos?
His sister's response, when I showed up a year later to ask her to judge a poetry contest (she agreed), was entirely different. At once she engaged the future for me, spelling out answers to questions I had never intended asking. She read my superego like a book, insisting that of course I should try for Oxford, where they trained prime ministers and taught you how to drink brandy and get plump, whereas Cambridge was for those awful scientists or boffins, back-room boys, who wanted to blow the world up. She mentioned The Shadow of Cain, which I had actually read. "Oxford," she said mesmerizingly, "will make you reach beyond yourself and be something in this world, the other place will stand you, dear boy, at a microscope and send you blind. I never attended a University myself. My nose was so hideous they decided to keep me out of sight in the hall cupboard. At least until some doctor, not a Nazi, made me presentable and straightened my dear old Plantagenet schnoz straight. You take those exams, and don't let me catch you not doing well. Tell them you know me and that I have taught you to appreciate poetry."
"Well, you have, Miss." I had read her extraordinary patient look at the texture of Alexander Pope, a most unusual book for its period, with all the virtues of F. R. Leavis's close reading without his moral bigotry.
She was shocked, yet stubbornly gratified.
"No science, young you."
"No, Ma'am. I promise. I can't count anyway."
"Oxford."
"Oxford, Ma'am, if I can."
"Of course you can. If you don't, they'll hear from me. There are some awfully nasty people in the literary profession, young you, and they are going to hear from me, vulgarly known as getting it in the neck."
I don't know about Mellors, but if it were true it was more likely to have been Maynard Hollingsworth the estate agent who swept through the village in gaiters, braying and barking, his demeanor one of irascible gentility. When he bowed, some internal mercury tilted free of its meniscus and silvered his track behind him. A loose god had walked among us, urgent and aloof. Would even he have said Mellors except as a curse under his beery breath?
Perhaps the most incongruous part of my childhood and adolescence was the way in which, unnoticed by me, various creative and cultural worthies—icons even—sauntered with the Sitwells through the village streets of Eckington, stopping at this or that pub for a drink. Here came Alec and Merula Guinness, the painter John Piper, the composer William Walton, the poet Dylan Thomas (virtually adopted and protected by Edith), and several others, an aesthetic invasion unidentified by locals who regarded them as mere "nobs" come slumming. With them, I vaguely recall, came Osbert's constant friend Captain Stanier, one of those who held on to and exploited his rank after the First War. The teenager who saw them without heeding them was planning his exit into, he hoped, their company, faintly marveling at the facile way the Sitwells arranged for a couple of railway companies (the London-Midland-Scottish mainly) to put on a special train to whisk these luminaries from London up to the Renishaw halt. Money, plus grace and favor, swung that, I imagine; after all, the world was the Sitwells' oyster, they who spent much of the year in a castle in Italy, or in a mansion on the east coast at Scarborough. I imagine now that W. H. Auden and Aldous Huxley used to put in an appearance in Lady Chatterley's village until they lit out for the United States.
Had I realized, what on earth would I have said, butting in with my "I toos" in the village street, chronically unaware that the world I longed to join had several times strolled past the aspidistra in our music-room window. I should have been more alert to the way these unself-conscious artists argued in the street, heedless of traffic or villagers, almost a grown-up version of the schoolboys from Spinkhill College, the Catholic establishment high on a hill not far away, whose boys trickled into our streets on Saturday afternoons to buy candies and cookies. I think I once saw Dylan Thomas, untidy moppet, pausing in front of the tripe shop, afflicted with a complex rune the Brit reviewers would scold him for. But I was only just waking up, so to speak, coming to ambitious life, after a long and fruitful sleep in which, I distinctly recall, I had a recurring dream of reading, yet reading too slowly for all I wanted it to do for me, and therefore in a preparatory panic. How ironic to have had such illustrious visitations while gestating, pecking through the shell with my literary beak. First the Romans, so long ago, then the Norse and the French, and then the illuminati of London lent invisibly to that village of fact and fable.
Edward O. Wilson
Consilience
University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
For a long time I have considered children's secret hideaways to be a fundamental trait of human nature. The tendency to build them is, I believe, one of the epigenetic rules that compose human nature—a hereditary regularity in mental development that predisposes us to acquire certain preferences and to undertake practices of ultimate value in survival. From the secret places come an identification with place, a nourishing of individuality and self-esteem, and an enhanced joy in the construction of habitation. They also bring us close to the Earth and nature, in ways that can ensure a lifelong love of both. Such was my experience as a boy during the ages of eleven to fifteen, when I sought little Edens in the forests of Alabama and northern Florida. On one occasion I built a small hut of saplings in a remote off-trail spot. Unfortunately, I didn't notice that some of the saplings were poison oak! That was the last of my secret-house constructions, but my love of the natural world waxed ever more strongly.
