Looking back over nearly ¾ of a century, I find it
fascinating the things that I remember and the things that I have forgotten. I
wonder if children today create make-believe worlds in their imaginations, or
if that is a characteristic that the constant exposure to electronic media has
relegated to our past. Is imagination a lost treasure from our cultural past?
On the hilltop farm in Virginia that I grew up on, a large
pasture took up the better half of the back of the farm. The horse paddocks and
stable occupied the rest. The back pasture ran from directly behind the chicken
yard behind the house all the way to the eastern end of the farm. Three
parallel ridges ran from the brow off the hill off to the south, deepening and
steepening as they went. There was a small stand of hardwoods that ran from a
small spring fed stream in the bottom of the last hollow up to and beyond the
line fence at the top of the next ridge.
The property line at the eastern end was an old road that
had been built before the Revolutionary War and abandoned in 1863. During the
Revolution, this road served the “Albemarle Barracks”, a camp that held British
and Hessian soldiers captured at the battle of Saratoga in 1777. This camp was
on the relatively level hilltop just a few yards north of the house that I grew
up in. (More about this later.) A
multi-flora rose hedge, long neglected and no longer serving as a “living
fence” ran between the pasture and the hilltop cropland. The hedge stood on
what had likely been the eastern wall of the camp. At the southern end of the hedge
was an ancient oak tree, sitting right outside of what was likely the corner of
the camp palisade fence. As children, we called this “the big fat, juicy tree.”
Along the pasture’s southern line fence several old oak trees provided shade
along the old wire fence. Beyond the line fence nearly a thousand acres of
abandoned farmland stretched between the place we farmed to the very edges of
the city of Charlottesville.
That big back pasture was a magical world filled with
fairies, elves, pioneers, and marauding Indian warriors. There were even trolls
that lurked beneath the “bridge” that was really a log fallen across the little
stream in the far hollow. Each of the landmarks in the pasture had its own
denizens and stories. Even the bull wallows became “fairy rings” that served as
both places where the “fairies” held their celebrations, and “council sites”
where the elfish kings met, and where the Indian chiefs held their councils,
and where the pioneers met to plan their forays into the unknown lands ahead of
them.
It is funny, though, the things that we remember and the
things that we forget. Without trying too hard, I can remember my brother and I
climbing on the Angus bull as he rested in the shade of “the big, fat, juicy
tree”, completely ignoring the little boys climbing on him. I remember how the
wind would blow the grass, sending wave after wave up the long ridges. I still
can see the spiderweb strands, wet with morning dew glistening in the autumn
sunlight. Almost 70 years gone, these memories are vivid and very real.
“A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys”
And like Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Little Jackie Paper”, the
Gerow children outgrew the magical world they had created in the back pasture.
Our version of “Puff the Magic Dragon”, the fairies, the elves, Daniel Boone
and his pioneers, and the marauding Indians all receded into a world of forever
twilight awaiting some other children in some other place and time.
It wasn’t just the Gerow kids that grew up and changed. The
back pasture changed too. After the cow herd was dispersed, the pasture became
a hayfield and the little boys who played in their magic world became teenagers
who worked in the hay field, raking hay and running wagons; cursing when the
front wheels of the old Farmall tractor would hit a “fairy ring” and snap the
steering wheel from their grasp, sending painful shocks all the way to their
shoulders.
And later still, Dad plowed the pasture to grow corn. The
wind waves in the grass no longer ran across the ridges. The bull wallows, our
“fairy rings”, disappeared beneath the leveling of the plow, the disk harrow,
and the packer. And the Gerow boys worked the soil in those clouds of red dust,
preparing the ground for planting. The “big, fat, juicy tree” was about all
that remained of the magical world of our childhood. It stood silent sentinel
on the high point as it had done for hundreds of years as the cowherd gave way
to haying, and the haying evolved into cropping.
The years have relentlessly rolled on. It is much farther
than the nearly ¾ of a century back to the childhood magic of the back pasture.
The distance can’t be measured in just time or distance, one must also
calculate in the lost hopes and dreams, the wins and losses, the loves and the
heartbreaks across all those years. It is not just nearly 70 years and over 300
miles back to that hilltop farm and the magical world in that back pasture; it
is the unmeasurable distance of life long-lived.
John Knowles ended his great novel “A Separate Peace” with
this phrase, "Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by
violence." I have no way of knowing if the great old oak tree still stands
guard on the high point of what was, way back then, the back pasture. I know
with absolute certainty that even if it is still standing there a quarter way
through the 21st century, someday it will be gone, as will I. That
passing is inevitable for "Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even
a death by violence."
“A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys . . .”
As I move deeper into the very late innings of this game, I
know with ontological certainty that there is life after this earthly
existence. It would be a truly heavenly experience to be able to revisit that
magical place and time and be one of those Gerow children again.
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