NEW JERSEY
- Applegate County
to be exact - in the 1930’s: surely there are more promising subjects, more
poetic landscapes to distil into the pages of a book. Heroic deeds in the usual
sense there were none. The same with love and romance: I was too young.
Exciting events, the sort that make headlines, were almost nonexistent - with
the exception of a single remote flash of lightning from Lakehurst.
There were no spectacular natural disasters, great happenings, no scientific
breakthroughs, no great discoveries, no historic sites, no movie stars or world
leaders emerging from humble beginnings.
What there was
were everyday heroics, odd and premature love stories, and important
discoveries aplenty for a ten year old coming of age in New
Jersey. There were impressive people, events that
rocked his foundations, if not the
world’s, and a sense of history in almost every step he took into the backwoods
of Sea Haven. Made real and perhaps larger than life through memory;
experiences seen in retrospect seem momentous enough, and not only to the
participants, but to unknown readers who carry with them their own
treasure-trove of recollections, submerged and unrealized until such time as
someone else’s memoir touches the spring that starts the reel rolling. At which
point forgotten terrain comes to life, voices long stilled beckon once again,
the rains and storms and sunshine of half a century ago revive in all their
freshness, affording us a new understanding of ourselves and the world we live
in now, which consists of a continuation of our cumulative experiences back
then and all along the way.
It turns out that the past is not
dead, not at all dead, but alive and carried within us for better and for worse
always, relegating the novelist’s notion that you can’t go home again to the
dustbin of permanent untruths. The fact is you never left home in the first
place.
