The Lost Landscape (7 page)

ONCE UPON A TIME
, the Sunday drive.

In our succession of Daddy's wonderful cars!

(Were Daddy's cars wonderful, or did my brother and I just imagine this? They were all American cars of course and all built by General Motors for my father worked for Harrison Radiator in Lockport, New York, an automotive supplier for GM. Though technically these were not “new cars” but “used” they were always “new” and spectacular to us.)

Where are we going, I would ask.

And the answer was enigmatic, Wait until we get there. You'll see.

Our car was our principal means of adventure, exploration, and entertainment; our lengthy, looping, seemingly uncalculated Sunday drives with sometimes my father, sometimes my mother, at the wheel were our primary means of experiencing ourselves as a
family.

Of course, we did not know this. We would scarcely have articulated such a notion, at the time.

Where weekday drives were always purposeful, Sunday drives were spontaneous and improvised. If Daddy was driving it was not unlikely that we might drive south on Transit Road in the direction of Lee's Airfield just to see who was there; if Mommy was driving it was not unlikely we might drive west or east on narrow curving country
roads along the Tonawanda Creek, where Mommy knew who lived in every house. Our car was like a small boat, or maybe a small plane, blown like the perpetual cumulus clouds of the sky above the Great Lakes, in any of these directions, by chance and not choice; the drives were familial daydreams, dreams somehow made conscious and translated into landscape. Unknowing, we were enchanted by the mystery of the (familiar) landscape and our place in it.

The writer is one who understands how deeply mysterious the “familiar” really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL
landscape in some way haunted.

Millersport Rapids Swormville Getzville East Amherst Clarence Rapids Pendleton Wolcottsburg Lockport Middleport Wrights Corners Gasport Ransomville Royalton Medina Wilson Newfane Olcott—a strangely comforting poetry these place-names of our Sunday drives. Open, uncultivated countryside; stretches of dense deciduous woods; pastures bounded by barbed wire in which dairy cows, beef cattle, sheep and horses grazed; fields planted in corn, wheat, potatoes, soybeans; miles of fruit orchards—apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees, peach trees; farmhouses that resembled my grandparents' house, large hay barns, dairy barns, silos and corncribs. Single-span wrought-iron bridges over the Tonawanda Creek or the Erie Barge Canal whose planks rattled as we crossed high above the water; smaller bridges over narrow streams, only just wide enough for a single vehicle. (The particular terror of the larger bridge was the possibility that a wide vehicle—truck, tractor—might be crossing at the same time, in the other lane; the driver of our car might then be required to back up, slowly and laboriously, to let the other
pass. The fear of the smaller bridge was that another vehicle might suddenly appear around a blind curve and collide head-on with us.) Two-lane blacktop roads sticky as licorice in hot summer; narrow rutted dirt roads winding like strips of fraying ribbon between plowed fields; those attractive and beguiling unpaved roads through dense countryside that dwindled into mere lanes bordering farmers' fields, bumpy and eventually impassable ending in what my parents called
dead ends
. . . We learn our awe of the world as children staring eagerly out the windows of a moving vehicle.

If we began our Sunday drive along the Erie County side of the Tonawanda Creek to Pendleton a few miles away we might cross the wrought-iron bridge at Pendleton and enter Niagara County; if the drive was to be a relatively short drive we might turn right, or west, onto the Tonawanda Creek Road, return to Transit Road a few miles away and cross the bridge into Millersport, and so to our house which was the first on the right, beside a small Esso gas station (operated by my mother's brothers Frank and Johnny Bush). Or, we might drive along the creek to Rapids, a few miles in the other direction, cross the bridge there and so return to Transit Road along a more circuitous route following the curves of the Tonawanda Creek, past the single-room schoolhouse which I attended for five grades, and which my mother had attended twenty years before, and so home. (“Tonawanda Creek Road” is a confusing term because, in effect, there were four roads with the same name, that might more accurately have been designated “Tonawanda Creek Road North-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road North-West”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-West.” These were country roads narrow and minimally paved, bisected by the wider Transit Road running north and south.)

When my father drove, my mother sat beside him in the passenger's seat. But whenever my mother drove, it meant that my father
wasn't coming with us because my father would never have consented to be a passenger in any vehicle in which he was not the driver.

(In this Fred Oates was the quintessential American male of his time. It wasn't a question of “equality”—that my mother was a woman was not the issue; it was a question of who had authority in a vehicle, and this was likely to be the man of the family, in whose name the vehicle had been purchased.)

These least adventurous/most familiar Sunday drives nonetheless intrigued my brother Robin (Fred, Jr.; born on Christmas Day 1943) and me, for our mother knew the inhabitants of virtually all of the houses along the Tonawanda Creek, if not personally then by reputation, or rumor; my fascination with people, as with their houses and “settings,” surely began with these Sunday drives and my mother's frequent, often quite startling and elliptical commentary. Six years in the one-room schoolhouse containing eight grades of often unruly “big boys” had enabled my mother's generation of young people to know one another intimately, if not always fondly; sometimes my mother's reticence was all that was forthcoming as we passed a house. (“Yes. I know who lives there.”)

This was an era memorialized by Edward Hopper of shingle-board houses with front porches and people sitting on these porches keen to observe people driving past in vehicles observing them. Narrow, winding creek roads were best for such sightings, for vehicles were likely to be driven at unhurried speeds on these roads; sometimes my mother would be stuck behind a slow-moving tractor or even a horse-drawn hay wagon.

Once, on the creek road to Rapids, when my father wasn't with us, my mother behind the wheel suddenly said: “In that house, a terrible thing happened.”

Mommy slowed the car. No one appeared to be visible in the house, observing us.

(Had this been an ordinary-seeming dwelling? Not a farmhouse but a smaller, shanty-like structure with a tar paper roof, set back from the road on a badly rutted driveway. In the front yard, straggly trees. Rusted hulks of cars in the scrubby grass. Decades later the name of the family who lived there is still vivid in my memory—not
Reichling
but a name that slant-rhymes with it.)

A man had been murdered, my mother said. The father of a girl with whom she'd gone to school.

At first it was believed that the man had “disappeared”—his wife claimed not to know where he was. But then his body was discovered in the creek behind the house; it had been forced inside a barrel, and the barrel had been nailed shut, and rolled down to the creek where it only partially sank in about five feet of water close to shore.

“The wife and her man-friend murdered him. Stabbed him. It was a terrible thing.”

Why did they kill him, I wanted to know. Were they arrested, were they in prison, who had discovered the body in the barrel—many questions sprang to my lips which my mother was vague about answering, whether because Mommy thought I should not be so curious, or because she didn't know. Enough for our mother to have surprised us by saying—
It was a terrible thing.

(I HAVE TO CONCEDE
that I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness. For instance, I can remember my mother's tantalizingly brief account of the murder on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Rapids only a few miles from our house but I can't fit this memory into a sequence of memories of that drive, that day, that week or even that year; our memories seem to lack the faculty for chronological continuity, in which case an episodic and impres
sionistic art most accurately replicates the meanderings of memory, and not chronological order. What is vivid in memory is the singular, striking, one-of-a-kind event or episode, encapsulated as if in amber, and rarely followed by the return home, that evening's dinner, exchanged remarks, the next morning; not routine but what violates routine.

Which is why the effort of writing a memoir is so fraught with peril, and even its small successes ringed by melancholy. The fact is—
We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time
.)

WHEN MY FATHER TOOK
us on Sunday drives, it was more likely that he would take us much farther, as he drove faster; on Transit Road, which Daddy traveled all too frequently, he was inclined to drive above the speed limit, and to pass slower cars with some measure of irritation. My sense of maleness, based solely and surely unfairly upon my father Fred Oates, is that the male more than the female is inclined to
impatience.

Where Mommy drove us on country roads never very far from the Tonawanda Creek, that cut through her childhood, as through mine, and fixed us comfortingly in place, Daddy had little interest in the familiar countryside of Erie County, apart from his visits to Lee's Airfield. The landscape of Fred Oates's boyhood was Niagara County: he'd been born in Lockport, in the least affluent area of the small city known informally as “Lowertown,” and had lived in Lockport all of his life until he'd married my mother and came to live with her in Millersport. (There had been an earlier domestic life in Lockport, about which I knew nothing, and which had always seemed to me romantic, as it had to have been short-lived. Only a scattering of snapshots allowed me to see my young parents,
an infant bundled in their arms, photographed in a waste of snow behind a rented apartment in Lowertown near the canal.
Where we lived before Millersport
—was the terse description.
Before we came to live with your grandparents.
)

Daddy's drives may have reflected his restlessness. The same restlessness that motivated him to fly airplanes, even to experiment one summer with a glider at Lee's Airfield. (Gliders are far more dangerous than small aircraft and Daddy may have had some close calls with this glider, about which my brother and I would not have been told.) Though Daddy did not drive slowly past houses and name to us their inhabitants and hint to us of the mysteries of lives within, yet Daddy's drives into Niagara County were more interesting than Mommy's drives in Erie County, as they were farther-ranging, and fraught with the kind of urgency my father brought to most things.

Daddy liked to follow the Erie Barge Canal westward in the direction of the beautiful turbulent Niagara River or eastward into hilly Orleans County, in the direction of Brockport and Rochester; he liked to drop in on a small airfield in Newfane, where he had friends; he liked to drop in at the Big Tree Inn near Newfane, or the Inn at Olcott Beach on Lake Ontario; there was the excitement of the Niagara County Fair at the Fairgrounds, and the excitement of volunteer firemen's picnics scattered through the county where food and drinks—especially beer—were served. Daddy's drives were not without direction like Mommy's but intended to bring him to places where, when he approached, voices lifted happily—“Fred! Jesus, here's Fred Oates.”

In such places there were jukeboxes. Clouded mirrors behind the bar where men who resembled my father turned to welcome him. Pervading smells of beer, cigarette smoke. Plastic ashtrays filled with ashes and butts. Small bowls in which greasy fragments of potato chips remained. If such places were on the vast, wind-lashed lake,
there was a sandy beach littered with broken shells. There were picnic areas with tables, benches. Summertime smell of wet sand, wet bathing suits and towels. Burnt charcoal, grilling hamburgers, hot dogs and mustard and ketchup. Broken rinds of watermelon on the ground, corncobs buzzing with flies. Discarded Coke bottles, beer bottles. Music from car radios.

If summer, and if near Lake Ontario, there was always a chance of lightning and thunderstorms. You started off in Millersport on a sunny blue-skied summer day, you ended at Lake Ontario in pelting rain beneath a boiling-black sky in autumnal chill. Even when we had plenty of time to return home, Daddy tended to ignore our pleas and continue driving. Or, if we were already at Lake Ontario, and the sky began to darken ominously, Daddy was likely to delay leaving until the last possible moment.

There came flashes of heat lightning, soundless. Then actual lightning, thunder. Deafening thunder like cymbals crashing. We were chastened waiting for the storm to pass beneath the overhangs of strangers' roofs, beneath tall windswept trees.

At the Big Tree Inn on a promontory above the lake there was indeed an enormous tree—probably an elm tree. The novelty of the “big tree” was that it had been many times struck by lightning. My mother feared lightning, as her older sister Elsie (my “Aunt Elsie” who lived in Lockport) had in fact been injured when lightning struck a doorway in which she was standing: Elsie's face, throat, and arm were riddled with slivers from the shattered doorframe; but my mother could not prevail against my father who thought a thunderstorm was an occasion for rejoicing and not cowering indoors.

My mother was not an assertive person. Especially she was not assertive with my father. Mommy might suggest turning back to avoid a storm but she could not insist, and if she had, our father
would have ignored her; if she'd insisted more adamantly, our father would have defied her.