The Lost Landscape

DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK

I LOVED MY FIRST school!—so I have often said, and possibly this is true.

As a child I was filled with excitement, anticipation, apprehension, sometimes dread at the prospect of school. For the schoolhouse on the Tonawanda Creek Road in Niagara County, about a mile from my home, was a magical place to me, a place of profound significance, and yet it was not a place in which, as a young child, I could exert anything approaching what I would not yet have known to call “control.”

I took for granted then what seems wonderful to me now: that, from first through fifth grades, during the years 1943 to 1948, I attended the same one-room schoolhouse that my mother, Carolina Bush, had attended twenty years before. Apart from the introduction of electricity in the 1940s, and a few minor improvements, not including indoor plumbing, the school had scarcely changed in the intervening years. It was a rough-hewn, weatherworn, uninsulated wood frame building on a crude stone foundation, built around the turn of the century at the approximate time my grandparents’ farmhouse was built, twenty-five miles north of Buffalo and about six miles south of Lockport.

In late August, in anticipation of school beginning after Labor Day in September, I would walk to the schoolhouse carrying my new pencil box and lunch pail, gifts from my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, to sit on the front, stone step of the school building. Just to sit there dreamy in anticipation of school starting: possibly to enjoy the solitude and quiet, which would not prevail once school started.

(Does anyone remember pencil boxes now? They were of about the size of a small lunch pail, with several drawers that, slid out, revealed freshly sharpened yellow “lead” pencils, Crayola crayons, erasers, compasses. The thrill of a compass with its sharp point! The smell of Crayolas! Lunch pails, which perhaps no one recalls either, were usually made of some lightweight metal, with handles; unlike pencil boxes which smelled wonderfully of crayons and erasers, lunch pails quickly came to smell awfully of milk in Thermos bottles, overripe bananas, peanut butter, jam, or baloney sandwiches, and much-used wax paper.)

The school, more deeply imprinted in my memory than my own child-face, was set approximately thirty feet back from the pebble-strewn unpaved Tonawanda Creek Road; it had three tall, narrow windows in each of its side walls, and very small windows in its front wall; a steeply slanting shingle board roof that often leaked in heavy rain; and a shadowy, smelly, shed-like structure at the front called the “entry”; nothing so romantic as a cupola with a bell to be rung, to summon students inside. (Our teacher Mrs. Dietz, standing Amazon-like in the entry doorway, rang a handbell. This was a sign of her adult authority; the jarring noise of the bell, the thrusting, hacking gesture of her muscled right hand as she vigorously shook it. In my memory, Mrs. Dietz’s sturdy face was usually flushed.)

Behind the school, down a slope of briars and jungle-like vegetation, was the “crick”—the wide, often muddy, fast-moving Tonawanda Creek, where pupils were forbidden to play or explore; on both sides of the school were vacant, overgrown fields; “out back” were crudely built wooden outhouses, the boys’ to the left and the girls’ to the right, with drainage, raw sewage, virulently fetid in warm weather, seeping out into the creek. (Elsewhere, off the creek bank, children, mostly older boys, often swam. They dived from the sides of the bridge when the water was high enough. There was not much consciousness of “polluted” waters in those days and even less fastidiousness on the part of energetic farm boys.)

My memory of the outhouses is a shudder of dread. But lately, I am apt to feel an alarmed sort of sympathy for poor Mrs. Dietz, who had no choice but to use the girls’ outhouse, too.

At the front of the school, and to the sides, was a rough playground of sorts, where we played such improvised games as “May I?”—which involved “baby-” and “giant-steps”—and “Pom-Pom-Pullaway” which was more raucous, and rougher, where one might be dragged across an expanse of cinders, even thrown into the cinders. And there was Hide-and-Seek, and Tag, which were my favorite games, at which I excelled, at least with children not too much older than I was.

Joyce runs like a deer! certain of the older boys, chasing me, as they chased other younger children, to bully and terrorize, would say, admiring.

Inside, the school smelled of varnish, chalk dust, and woodsmoke and ashes from the potbellied stove. On overcast days, not infrequent in western New York in this region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, hazy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of which these desks were made seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. The blackboard stretched across the front of the room. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, so positioned to draw our admiring eyes to it, to be instructed, were cardboard squares of the alphabet showing the beautifully shaped script known as Palmer Method.

All of my life, though my handwriting has changed superficially, it is the original Palmer Method that prevails. In an era in which handwriting scarcely exists, and most signatures are unintelligible, those of us who came of age under the tutelage of the Palmer Method can be relied upon to write not just beautifully, but legibly.

Perhaps Palmer Method carried with it an (unwitting, unconscious) moral bias? If beauty and clarity and a wish to communicate are your intention in writing, are you not likely to be good?

Mrs. Dietz, of course, had mastered the art of such penmanship. She wrote our vocabulary and spelling lists on the blackboard, and we learned to imitate her. We learned to “diagram” sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating equations. We learned to read by reading out loud, and we learned to spell by spelling out loud. We memorized, and we recited. Our textbooks were rarely new, but belonged to the school district and were passed on, year after year until they wore out entirely. (How I would love to examine those textbooks, now! I have not the vaguest memory of what we were actually being made to read, and what our arithmetic books were like.) Our school “library” was a shelf or two of books including a Webster’s dictionary, which fascinated me: a book comprised of words! A treasure of secrets this seemed to me, available to anyone who cared to look into it.

Some of my earliest reading experiences, in fact, were in this dictionary. We had no dictionary at home until, as the winner of a spelling bee sponsored by the Buffalo Evening News, when I was in fifth grade, I was given a dictionary like the one at school. This, like the prized Alice books, remained with me for decades.

My early “creative” experiences evolved not from printed books but from coloring books, predating my ability to read. I did not learn to read until I was in first grade and six years old, though by this time, comically precocious as I seem now in retrospect, I’d already produced a number of “books” of a kind in tablet form, by drawing, coloring, and scribbling in what I believed to be a convincing imitation of adults. My earliest fictional characters were not human beings but zestfully if crudely drawn upright chickens and cats engaged in what appeared to be dramatic confrontations; of course, Happy Chicken figured predominantly. The title of one of these tablet-novels was allegedly The Cat House, which was set in an actual house in which cats lived as human beings might live. (When I was an adult my father would joke with me about this title, whose double entendre humor had escaped me. For years my mother saved the tablet-novel among her things, but I think The Cat House must be lost to posterity by now.)

In addition to the Alice books which I’d soon memorized we had, at home, the daunting The Gold Bug and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, which was my father’s book: the title was in dull-gold letters on the book cover which was made of some odd, thick, dim material resembling mossy tree bark. What I could make of Poe’s belabored gothic prose, I can’t imagine. Though Poe’s classic tales seem to move, in our memories, with the nightmare rapidity of horror films, the prose in which Poe cast most of these tales is highly formal, tortuous, turgid if not opaque; his masterpiece “The Tell-Tale Heart” is unique in its head-on fluency. Yet, somehow, perhaps because I had few other books close at hand, I persevered in reading Poe as a young child, and must have absorbed, along with the very different prose-consciousness of Lewis Carroll, something of that writer’s unique sensibility. (No wonder my immediate kinship with Paul Bowles, whose first story collection, The Delicate Prey, is dedicated to his mother, who had read Bowles the tales of Poe as a young child.)

My child’s logic, which was not corrected by any adult because it would not have occurred to me to mention it to any adult, was that the mysterious world of books was divided into two types: those for children, and those for adults. Reading for children, in our grade-school textbooks, was simpleminded in its vocabulary, grammar, and content; it was usually about unreal, improbable, or unconditionally fantastic situations, like fairy tales, comic books, Disney films. It might be amusing, it might be instructive, but it was not real. Reality was the province of adults, and though I was surrounded by adults, as an only child for five years, it was not a province I could enter, or even envision, from the outside. To enter that reality, to find a way in, I read books.

Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

One of the earliest books I read, or tried to read, was an anthology from our school library, an aged Treasury of American Literature that had probably been published before World War II. Mixed with writers who are mostly forgotten today (James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Helen Hunt Jackson) were our New England classics—though I was too young to know that Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Melville, et al. were “classics” or even to know that they spoke out of an America that no longer existed, and would never have existed for families like my own. I believed that these writers, who were exclusively male, were in full possession of reality. That their reality was so very different from my own did not discredit it, or even qualify it, but confirmed it: adult writing was a form of wisdom and power, difficult to comprehend but unassailable. These were no children’s easy-reading fantasies but the real thing, voices of adult authenticity. I forced myself to read for long minutes at a time, finely printed prose on yellowed, dog-eared pages, retaining very little but utterly captivated by the strangeness of another’s voice sounding in my ear. I tackled such a book as I would tackle a tree (a pear tree, for instance) difficult to climb. I must have felt almost physically challenged by lengthy, near-impenetrable paragraphs so unlike the American-English language spoken in Millersport, and totally unlike the primer sentences of our schoolbooks. The writers were mere names, words. And these words were exotic: “Washington Irving”—“Benjamin Franklin”—“Nathaniel Hawthorne”—“Herman Melville”—“Ralph Waldo Emerson”—“Henry David Thoreau”—“Edgar Allan Poe”—“Samuel Clemens.” There was no Emily Dickinson in this anthology, I would not read Emily Dickinson until high school. I did not think of these exalted individuals as actual men, human beings like my father and grandfather who might have lived and breathed; the writing attributed to them was them. If I could not always make sense of what I read, I knew at least that it was true.

It was the first-person voice, the (seemingly) unmediated voice, that struck me as truth-telling. For some reason, children’s books are rarely narrated in the first-person; Lewis Carroll’s Alice is always seen from a little distance, as “Alice.” (Yet we see everything through Alice’s amazed eyes, and we never know anything that Alice does not know.) But many of the adult writers whom I struggled to read wrote in the first person, and very persuasively. I could not have distinguished between the (nonfiction) voices of Emerson and Thoreau and the (wholly fictional) voices of Irving and Poe; even today, I have to think to recall if “The Imp of the Perverse” is a confessional essay, as it sets itself up to be, or one of the Tales of the Grotesque. I may have absorbed from Poe a predilection for moving fluidly through genres, and grounding the surreal in the seeming “reality” of an earnest, impassioned voice. Poe was a master of, among other things, the literary trompe l’oeil, in which speculative musings upon human psychology shift into fantastic narratives while retaining the earnest first-person voice.

One day I would wonder why the earliest, most “primitive” forms of art seem to have been fabulist, legendary, and surreal, populated not by ordinary, life-sized men and women but by gods, giants, and monsters? Why was reality so slow to evolve? It’s as if, looking into a mirror, our ancestors shrank from seeing their own faces in the hope of seeing something other—exotic, terrifying, comforting, idealistic, or delusional—but distinctly other.

Of Mrs. Dietz, I think: how heroic she must have been! Underpaid, undervalued, overworked. (I am guessing that a female teacher in this rural outpost in the 1940s was “underpaid.”) Not only was it the task of a one-room schoolteacher to lead eight disparate grades through their lessons, but also to maintain discipline in the classroom, where most of the older boys attended school grudgingly, waiting for their sixteenth birthdays when they were legally released from attending school and could work with their fathers on family farms; these boys were taught by older male relatives to hunt and kill animals, and they were without mercy in “teasing” (the more accurate term “harassing” had not yet been coined) younger children. Mrs. Dietz was also in charge of maintaining our wood-burning stove, the school’s only source of heat, in that pitiless upstate New York climate in which below-zero temperatures weren’t uncommon on gusty winter mornings, and we had to wear mittens, hats, and coats through the day, stamping our booted feet against the drafty plank floor to keep our toes from going numb . . . I can only imagine the emotional and psychological difficulties poor Mrs. Dietz endured, and feel now a belated kinship with her, who had seemed to me a very giantess of my childhood. No other teacher looms as archetypal in my memory, for no other teacher taught me the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and doing arithmetic, which seem to me as natural as breathing. I am grateful to Mrs. Dietz for not (visibly) breaking down, and for maintaining a certain degree of good cheer in the classroom. The schoolhouse for all its shortcomings and dangers became for me a kind of sanctuary: a precious counter-world to the chaotic and unbookish roughness that existed outside it.

Years later, revisiting the Lockport area, giving a talk sponsored by the Lockport Public Library, I was approached by a woman of my approximate age who looked familiar to me, to a degree; when the woman introduced herself, I remembered her at once, as a girl who’d lived on a farm a few miles away on one of the creek-side roads; she spoke of how, outside the school at recess, I would sometimes “teach” her and a few other children, who hadn’t understood our teacher Mrs. Dietz . . . What a pleasure to meet again, after so many years, Nelia Pynn! I love the name, out of that lost past, and must write it again: Nelia Pynn.

FOR A LONG TIME vacant and boarded up, District #7 school was finally razed in the late 1970s. And for a long time afterward, when I returned to Millersport to visit my parents, I would make a sentimental journey to the site, where a collapsed stone foundation and a mound of rubble were all that remained. Soon such one-room schoolhouses will be recalled, if at all, only in photographs: links with a mythopoetic “American frontier past” that, when it was lived, seemed to us, who lived it, simply life.

PIPER CUB

“DON’T BE AFRAID. DADDY is right here.”

Yet, Daddy was not visible to me, for Daddy was behind me. It did not seem natural to me that my father, who always drove our car from the position of authority behind the steering wheel, was seated behind me in the Piper Cub that was a beautiful bright yellow like a butterfly’s wings.

It was a summer day in the late 1940s. I would have been nine or ten years old. My young, adventurous father Fred Oates had earned a pilot’s license a few years before, and this was my first trip with him.

Daddy had not been drafted into the army as he’d feared. He had not served in World War II due to deferments he and his fellow workers at Harrison Radiator had been given, since they were involved in “defense manufacturing.” And now, after the war, planes belonging to the government had passed into private ownership, and men like my father began to take flying lessons.

How and why my father took flying lessons at Lee’s Airfield on Transit Road north of Buffalo, New York, I have no idea. There wasn’t much money in any household in which he’d ever lived. To help with expenses my father not only worked at Harrison’s but also painted signs for commercial businesses in the area. Yet somehow he’d been able to afford flying lessons as early as 1935 (when he was twenty-one) and had acquired a pilot’s license by 1937, the year before I was born, which enabled him to fly not only small planes like Piper Cubs, Cessnas, and Stinsons but also eventually the sporty Waco double-winged biplane, and even ex–Air Force trainers—a Fairchild with 175 horsepower, a Vultee basic trainer, 450-horsepower, with a canopied open cockpit that could fly at twelve thousand feet.

My first time in the Piper Cub would be one of the great memories of my life.

Initially, immediately, there was the strangeness of my father “dressing” me—(which he never did; only my mother dressed me)—as I was outfitted with goggles and a helmet, which were much too large for me. (My father wore a parachute, but I did not, which might have seemed ominoua if I had thought about it. But of course—I could not have used a parachute.) Next, I was half-lifted by Daddy into the single front seat of the plane, and buckled in; the door which seemed to be made of some metal much lighter than a car door was shut and secured. Next, the Piper Cub propeller was turned manually by a boy who worked at the airfield until it began to spin with a loud roar, and the motor kicked in. Next, I was being driven along the bumpy airstrip, past rows of larger planes, at an ever-accelerating speed, totally terrified, dry-mouthed and astonished as I stared through the windshield at a world that was rushing at me much too quickly, and without any adult to shield me from it as if I, and not my father behind me, were the pilot.

Suddenly then, and sickeningly, the quaking little plane was in the air—rising above a row of trees, and above open fields.

Like any ten-year-old I trusted my father, absolutely. As I trusted my mother. (And now I wonder what my young mother must have been thinking, watching us from the runway. Did she, too, have complete trust in my father? Was she frightened when he took her up into the air, and did she really want to accompany him?—or was she, perhaps subtly, coerced? Should my father, with his newly acquired pilot’s license, have taken up a ten-year-old child?) There was a daredevil recklessness to life in those days which seems in our more cautious era, in which children are likely to be over-protected by their parents, very remote indeed. Recall that this was a time when seat belts in vehicles were unknown and virtually everyone (including my parents) smoked.

Through his life my father would always say, “Flying is safer than driving a car.” Statistically, this is (evidently) true, yet not quite a consolation for some of us.

My most vivid memories of that first trip are the fields opening beneath the plane, the blur of the spinning propeller close in front of me, the buffeting rush of the wind, and the quaking of the plane. In small aircraft you are very conscious of the wind. You are very conscious of the sky. Below, every detail seems heightened. You have suddenly an entirely new, unexpected perspective—you are looking down, bizarrely, from above. It is something of a miracle to see the roofs of houses and barns not so very far below as you pass over.

Pilots of small planes invariably head for home to fly over their houses and property. My father never failed to do this, a quick trip of only a few minutes, since our farmhouse was no more than three miles away. What is more pleasurable than to “buzz” the houses of friends and relatives?

Such playfulness suggests the youth of my father at this time, as it suggests the youth of the era. “Buzzing” low over houses and property was viewed as a sort of practical joke and not a dangerous annoyance as we would be inclined to see it today.

In the Piper Cub my father was likely to fly us to Lockport, where we could see the Erie Barge Canal stretching out below; he was likely to fly us in the direction of Niagara Falls, and the Niagara River; we would never fail to see the Tonawanda Creek, that stretched past our house on Transit Road and would enter my dreams for a lifetime. All these waterways were fascinating to me like the wind-buffeted airborne perspective itself. Safety is a small price to pay for such a perspective!—so my father might have said.

To be in the air—airborne! There was nothing like it for my father and his pilot-friends.

Returning to the airfield: that thrill in the pit of the stomach as the Piper Cub circles the runway and begins to dip down. (Sometimes, if the plane isn’t in the ideal position, the pilot decides not to land. And so you sweep up again, rapidly up into the air again, the nose of the plane lifting into the sky so that for an unnerving moment there is nothing to see but sky.) Then, circling back, and trying again as the nose of the plane is lowered by a movement of the pilot’s stick.

Landing is the most dangerous maneuver. A mistake at that time can be fatal . . .

A reassuring jolt as the plane’s wheels strike the runway and within an instant the plane is on the ground, bouncing and bumping along the runway.

Returning to the hangar in a kind of triumph. And my mother hurrying forward to greet us with a tight embrace and a little sob of relief as if to say Thank God! You are returned to me safely.