I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (27 page)

The moment I beheld Roman legionaries clanking in formation around a Las Vegas parking lot was the moment I vowed to experience transatlantic living-history at first hand. A horribly patronising sneer besmirched my face whenever I imagined the prospect, which was increasingly often now that my journey through time had nosed into the realms of nonnative American history – let's not forget that Virginia was named thus in honour of the famously intact Elizabeth I.

What a deflating, sneer-wiping experience, when at last I sat down to select myself a Stateside group, to discover historical re-enactment as we know it today to be an entirely American invention. The transatlantic phenomenon that is the Renaissance Faire may have serious re-enactors choking on their pottage, but the fact remains that these beery celebrations of velvet and cleavage, which today attract five million Americans a year with their Drench-A-Wench stalls and jousting unicyclists, can trace their heritage right back to the late fifties. A young Dustin Hoffman earned his acting spurs at one, playing a dragon slain by St George.

By the mid sixties, while those pioneering neo-Vikings shuffled uncertainly up the Isle of Man beaches in their Dr Scholl's sandals, American enthusiasts were already organising incomparably more professional re-enactments as part of the Civil War centenary festivities. The movement was soon sufficiently well entrenched for US participants to abbreviate themselves as 'nactors, and before the decade was out an American had coined what would become the globally accepted term of derision applied to any ill-equipped weekend casual: 'farb', a word of obscure etymology, perhaps most convincingly explained as a contraction of 'far be it from me to criticise that impression'. It is perhaps the greatest testimony to US living history's well-worn heritage that its participants were dissing each other for inauthenticity at a time when the Sealed Knot, the English Civil War group that kickstarted European re-enactment, was still but a pewtery twinkle in its founders' eyes.

Give or take the odd ringtone and roll-up, in terms of immersive authenticity my experiences to date had been characterised by a generally upward trajectory. If I wished to continue this trend, it would mean tracking down an unusually dedicated living historian, the 'nactor's 'nactor. And that, in splendid defiance of my lazy preconceptions, meant crossing the Atlantic.

'I have heard this fellow spoken of at re-enactors' workshops, revered as the ultimately developed character' . . . 'His persona is a truly authentic settler, like a relic from another age' . . . 'My brother said he just showed up with his animals and blew everyone away.' Clue by clue, link by link, arresting commendation by arresting commendation, I homed in on my target and began to track him down across the American scene's sprawling online territories.

The nameless cattleman in question seemed imbued with a semi-mythical status: the few who claimed a sighting told of a character apparating at historical fairs with a well-trained team of oxen, then apparating out again, leaving a profound impression but no contact details. After a couple of weeks of this I began to wonder if the whole thing was the product of febrile minds and too many nights round the campfires, like something out of a Clint Eastwood ghost Western.

I was about to move on when a name abruptly landed in my inbox. 'Hi Tim – I think you are looking for Gerry Barker, from Wisconsin.' An eager reply prompted a photographic attachment: 'Here is the gent in question at an event in Ohio. He really projects the image!'

I double clicked and found myself confronted by a senior interpretation of the
Rocky Horror Show
's Riff Raff, casually at ease upon a recumbent, nose-ringed steer. An attendant foreground schoolboy, beaming into camera beneath a tricorn hat evidently removed from the bald pate behind him, obscured most of what went on below that craggy face and the straggly curtains of grey hair that framed it. Only the cattleman's feet were visible: utterly bare, but for a lavish slathering of bullshit.

The personal details swiftly procured an email address; the almost instant reply to my tentative approach confirmed that here was a re-enactor cut from a very much rougher cloth than any I had yet encountered. Declaring that his focus was on 'living-history experiments', not public events, Mr Barker described at length the life of a lone ox wagoner,
circa
1775, and his zealous determination to emulate it. My eye ran through paragraphs littered with troubling phrases of intent: 'middle of nowhere . . . fifteen miles a day . . . sleeping on the ground without a tent . . . trail food – a lot of Johnny cake'. In reference to a throwaway comment I'd made regarding his bare feet, he wrote: 'I do usually walk without shoes, but I got frost-bitten this past winter and am not recovered yet, so may reconsider.'

All this meant I had to struggle very hard to accept an invitation to accompany him for a few days in the calmly gracious manner with which it was issued, and to blot out the implications of its accompanying caveat: 'I had not intended to ask any one else to take part, because it is going to be uncomfortable.' The sign-off that ended this sobering communication seemed to toll out across the screen. 'Good enough, I have to get out and beat animals. Your Obedient Serv't, Sir, Gerry Barker.'

Further contact revealed Gerry as a man of companionable charm and understated wit, but did nothing to appease my terror. Three months later, seated in the arid, air-conditioned chill of Cincinatti Airport's meeting point, I reacquainted myself with a print-out of his collated correspondence, and the improbable blend of erudite curiosity and horny-handed endurance that defined it. 'I am probably too intense for most people,' he had written early on, 'but my personal goal has been to learn from controlled living-history projects, experiments that start with a question.'

Questions Gerry had previously sought to answer included whether it was possible to turn a patch of forest into a twostorey log cabin in three months using only eighteenth-century equipment (it was); if one man could make gunpowder from scratch in a weekend (using bat crap and charcoal, he could; and how long it might take a family to clear a plot of land, raise from this a crop of flax, and process the resultant harvest into a shirt (a year, and 120 hours of labour per head). Along with a hardy crew of likeminded companions, Gerry had built roads, led pack trains through mountains and across rivers, and waged a five-month campaign against Native Americans, who from hereon in I'm going to have to call Indians, because this was 1775 and anything else just sounds silly. He had done things that were doubtless awful in ways I didn't understand, like boiling salt, retting jute and surveying 130 rods of boundary, and things that I all too clearly did: 'At the Siege of Martin's Station we wanted to see what it was like for sixty people and their animals to live enclosed in an area the size of a basketball court.'

I folded the wodge of paper back into the smutted linen haversack that had now been at my side since the first century AD, contemplating once again how richly deserved was the hallowed, almost legendary status which the 'nacting community had conferred upon the man I was soon to meet. An academic with an MA in Labour History, and an experimental archaeologist whose unquenchable thirst for calloused and malnourished adventure was expressed in the worrisome phrase that ended his final email: 'I am as careful with historical accur acy as the current law allows.' Gerry Barker: Übernactor.

'Uh, Mr Moore?'

I looked up and found a generous slice of foreground filled by a huge, panting man with a walking stick. Long grey smock, long grey hair, and an air of breathless bemusement: he looked for all the world like an acid casualty who had wandered off into the woods in the summer of 1967, and only just found his way out. 'How's flying these days?' he wheezed, having introduced himself as Butch. 'Kind of gave that up forty years back.'

Butch, I knew from our emails, was an old friend of Gerry's, and a long-term collaborator in historical endeavours: the smock, I noted with a now well-trained eye, was in truth a shin-length linen shift, and the headband which kept his hair off that moist forehead was more pioneer than pot-head. 'Gone let myself get unfit and fat,' he sighed, pausing for breath as we shuffled towards the airport multi-storey. How I regretted not expressing more forcefully a willingness to drive myself from Cincinatti to the Daniel Boone National Forest, the million-acre Kentucky wilderness Gerry had selected for his latest experiment.

Only after several further rests did Butch arrive at the extravagantly careworn pick-up truck that was to take us there. 'Someone bust into the cab last night,' he grunted, unnecessarily nodding his head at the glinting shards of quarter-light that carpeted the threadbare front seats. I brushed off the worst and climbed in, breathing in a now-familiar draught of woodsmoke and dung, and placing my feet carefully into a footwell filled with straw hats, tins of a substance mysteriously labelled 'Instant Shoe Foal Extension' and a great many balls of lead shot, which cannoned noisily into the bulkhead when Butch engaged reverse and stamped on the loud pedal.

We had about 150 miles to drive, Butch reckoned; with the odometer broken and the speedo needle hanging limply at zero, he could be no more precise. What time would we get there? Butch smiled carelessly. 'My watch fell off in 1975,' he said, 'and I never have seen a reason to put it back on.'

I gazed through the cracked windscreen as malls and motels thinned out into primeval forest, my stubbled cheeks buffeted by waves of thick and clammy August afternoon blasting in through the broken window. Not shaving for three days beforehand was now part of my two-pronged pre-re-enactment programme, the other being to stuff my fat face like a squirrel preparing for winter. Never before had my short-term nutritional future looked bleaker – pondering the composition of 'Johnny cake' as I laid waste to my sleeping neighbour's in-flight breakfast, I imagined Gerry offering some future historical companion a runny portion of Timmy cake.

We stopped at an agricultural superstore, where Butch shuffled incongruously through clusters of check-shirted, baseball-capped good old boys in search of bovine insect repellent. Fair enough, I thought: the oxen hadn't volunteered for this trip, so it didn't seem right to punish them as part of our own perverse pursuit of period discomforts. Browsing the aisles I found my attention attracted by a display-case crammed with viciously serrated weaponry, lethal chemicals and armoured protective clothing. Presiding over this was a placard with a starkly evocative legend: 'The Stuff You Need Out Here'.

On we rumbled towards the hazy, blue-green southward horizon. Where did 'out here' start, and how would we cope in it without any of that stuff? Surveying the rolling, un peopled immensity, and hearing of Butch's upbringing on a Wisconsin dairy farm – with his father an invalid, he'd been left in charge of the herd at the age of twelve – I realised how close so many in this great and still largely untamed land must feel to their pioneering forefathers, in a way that so few Europeans ever could. To condense Gerry's living-historical mission into a fatuous one-liner, his aim was to find out how the West was won. Out here in rural Kentucky, with a population half that of London's dispersed across an area larger than Hungary, it was easy to imagine this as an ongoing battle.

Butch's preferred mode of interaction was to intersperse long, companionable silences with arresting revelations, stridently delivered. 'Know what I do?' he'd blurt, drawing me from jetlagged slumber. 'That's right, I've got me a bee farm!'

Through this conversational process – one rendered more compelling once the sun settled towards the eastern hills and we had an already quiet road to ourselves – I learned that Butch was registered disabled with severe dropsy, that his 'nactment-phobic wife was delighted to have him 'confined to an armchair', and that a fear of 'everything going down' courtesy of a Y2K-bug government plot had compelled him to see in the millennium in the sanctuary of Gerry's house. And I learned that my chauffeur was an ordained minister. 'I hate any kind of "ism",' he yelped abruptly, 'except creationism!' With that he thrust a business card at me, and in the squinting half-light I read it: 'Dr Butch Hauri, Frontier Reform Church'. And underneath: 'Adventures with God'. 'I'm the real thing, by the way,' he added. 'Licensed to hatch, match and dispatch.'

Deep into the silence that followed, we turned down an unkempt road signposted 'Salt Lick', which inspired my chauffeur into a sermon on the effects of livestock dehydration. Fatigue and a terror of offending a licensed dispatcher had for some time restricted my contributions to the odd hum and nod, so it was something of a surprise to hear myself inform Butch that the ox was an endangered species in most European countries. 'A
what
? An ox is just an old bull, London boy!' And he laughed and laughed, like they did in the
Dukes of Hazzard
.

He was still chuckling wheezily as we drove across a huge dam, past a sign that welcomed us to the Daniel Boone National Forest, and then off into a lakeside car park, empty but for a cavernous cage-sided trailer. I climbed out, briefly entertained Butch with my flailing attempts to see off several hundred winged parasites, and climbed back in. For some time we sat and watched the daylight fail. 'Re-enactors talk about "doing it like Barker",' Butch suddenly exclaimed. 'They come up and offer to buy his old clothes, like he was a celebrity.' Another long pause. 'Do you have any idea how many thousands of people would give their eye teeth to experience what you're about to experience?'

'Is it fourteen?' I felt like saying.

Then, distantly at first, but soon with twilight-shredding intensity, a rumbling tumult of clanks and scrapes echoed forth from the dark woodland ahead of us, periodically counterpointed with the gees and hups of livestock management. Presently the cream linen bonnet of a covered wagon asserted itself through the gloaming, followed in order of luminosity by the jiggling ivory sickles of eight bull horns, two human faces, the pale blue flanks of the wagon itself and finally, huge and rusty, four lumbering, nose-ringed beasts of burden.