Chapter One
HARD TIMES-GOOD TIMES
Without appeal to authority I can fix the date by deduction. It was after things began to happen to me that I can remember, but before I started school. Therefore I was four years old and it was the winter, the Christmas, of 1931. Dates and other numbers aside, I recall the details very well, so well that recall is not exactly the right word. It''s inadequate.
There are incidents in one''s life-some large in terms of consequence, others in retrospect apparently trivial-that can be virtually recreated when the proper interior buttons are touched. These-these what, these phenomena of the past?-seem to retain sensual weight and quality. Colors, shapes, voices, faces, smells, tastes return as they once were, in arrangements and sequences they once had. The Christmas of 1931 is one of half a dozen such moments that exist for me in this peculiar area between simple memory and near spookery. My mother, father and I were living in a barely winterized summer cottage on the shore of a marshy Michigan lake about 10 miles south of Kalamazoo. I have only dim, disconnected memories of why we were there and what we were doing, but having often been told about it by those who are older, I have now a fairly accurate understanding of the events leading up to that winter and that Christmas.
For virtually everyone who remembers the early 1930s, the overwhelming event of those years, the one that still marks the entire decade, was the Great Depression. My family, like most others, was caught in the awful economic storms, and though our lives were not so disastrously blighted as those of many, they were changed and disarranged. In the decade before I existed, my father had graduated from college as a botanist and landscape architect, an uncommon profession and one which I understand was then regarded by many, including his own father, as being essentially a frivolous one. However, in the flush times of the 1920s landscape architecture turned out to be a surprisingly good calling. Around Detroit there were a lot of tycoons and sub-tycoons and pseudo-tycoons who had done very well recently with the automobile and were anxious to display their good fortune publicly and ostentatiously. One conventional way of doing this was to create large estates vaguely modeled on ancient British country homes. Along with slate roofs, marble statuary and mahogany paneling, they wanted gentry-type grounds and gardens. But they did not want to wait a century or so for nature to do the job. Instead, they hired landscape architects to create for their new homes at least the illusion of old and deep roots.
Many years later, when times were somewhat better, my father and I drove from Kalamazoo to Detroit to take in a Tiger-Yankee doubleheader. On our way to Detroit we made a detour through what had been the heart of the exurban estate country. We stopped at one overgrown property on which the only completed structure was an imposing gatehouse. Near it, crowded by scrub sassafras and sumac, was a magnificent copper beech. My father looked it over and told me how it came to be there, though he may have been talking as much to himself as to me. Indicating the property with a nod, he said, "The owner had a kind of majordomo who was in charge here. The spring and summer we worked here, the owner was living in some kind of palace in Italy. The majordomo looked over our plans and said they were fine, but he said when the owner came back in the fall he would want to see mature plantings, not young stuff that had to grow. I found this beech-must have been 30 feet tall then-in an old nursery on the other side of Detroit. We dug it up with excavating equipment, balled it and put it on a big flatbed. The majordomo pulled strings and got some power lines temporarily raised. We brought it from the nursery to the estate around two in the morning, with a police escort. The bill for that one tree was almost 3,000 dollars. We never did get paid."
That tycoon and a lot of others like him did not pay, probably did not even come back to their unfinished estates that fall, which must have been 1929. One of the first orders they gave to their majordomos was to stop buying boxwood mazes, yew hedges and 3,000-dollar copper beeches. Few professions could have been as vulnerable to the Depression as landscape architecture. Almost instantly my father''s training and talent had no market value, and he had little choice but to retreat from the city, from the estate country. At least he, and by then we, had a place to retreat to in the southwestern Michigan countryside from which he had come a decade earlier. Caught up in the euphoric, cost-be-damned spirit of the ''20s, my grandfather had purchased most of the eastern shore of a mile-long, weedy lake. His plan had been to create what is now called a recreational community-put in some facilities for warm-weather fun and games that would entice people to buy lots along the lake and build summer homes. After 1929 most people were not much interested in a second home because they were often hard-pressed to keep their first one. Beyond a lot of subdivision stakes hidden in the uncleared thickets, all that had come of this grand scheme were half a dozen cottages-three of which were occupied by members of our family-and behind them a pretty nine-hole golf course that my father had designed during the flush times more or less as an experimental exercise. Later, when he was again able to practice his profession, building golf courses became one of his specialties.
It was to this place, itself a monument to the dislocation of the Depression, that various members of our extended family came in 1930 to weather the hard times. My father acted as greenskeeper for the golf course and, on the rare occasions when there was any demand, as a self-ordained golf professional. My mother and assorted aunts collected fees and sold concessions in what was pretentiously called the clubhouse. (It was in fact a one-room cabin which, if the resort scheme had materialized, would have been the caddie shack.) The clubhouse crew was seldom overwhelmed by business. Greens fees were 50 cents for nine holes, 75 cents for all-day play, but even so business was slow. I remember how slow because as I grew older I would hang around waiting for players, either to sell them golf balls I had found on the course or hoping, usually without gratification, that one of them might want a caddie. My mother recalls things more statistically. "Usually we took in less than 50 dollars a week," she says, "but there was a Fourth of July weekend, probably in 1932 or 1933, when we made 102 dollars. I can remember sitting around in the afternoon hoping to go over a hundred. Just after supper two foursomes showed up, and that put us over. It was like winning the lottery."
Although 50 dollars a week was not an inconsiderable sum in those difficult times, the golf course produced such income only during the three or four warm-weather months. And from that income, maintenance expenses (not many, because labor, contributed by members of the family, was not counted) had to be deducted before what was left could be divvied up among all the relatives. There were a lot of other small money-making or money-substitute projects. A large communal garden was planted between the caddie shack and the ninth green and this provided us with most of our vegetables. A swatch of rough along the fifth and sixth fairways was fenced off for sheep, although not very efficiently because the Judas goat was forever escaping to roam about the course begging tobacco from golfers and, occasionally, butting them when they did not come across. Once a week or so someone not otherwise engaged would row out on the lake and-for sport and dinner-come back with a mixed bucket of bass, bluegills and bullheads. The adjacent marshes were full of big bullfrogs which, later on, a young uncle showed me how to gig, as well as how to dress out the legs. There were lots of squirrels and rabbits, occasional pheasants and rarely a deer or, as it was thought of then, venison. A chicken yard was the most dependable source of more or less free protein.
We were more fortunate than many in having considerable land to work and forage, but there was a chronic shortage of money for everything from tractor parts to electricity, things that could not be grown, found or caught. Very occasionally someone like a bread manufacturer, a coal distributor or a physician, more immune than most to the Depression, would commission my father to do a small landscaping job. To cut costs he searched out and used wild species and materials. Years later, when he was designing large and much-admired private and public landscapes, his use-out of preference then rather than necessity-of wild trees, shrubs and flowers became a professional trademark.
In the winter he cut wood, mostly oak that grew abundantly around the golf course. The cottage was heated with this wood, and sometimes he could sell it-at $3.50 a cord, $5 delivered. As anyone who has cut down a cord of firewood, dragged it in, sawed it up, split it and ranked it knows, this is a very small return for a lot of labor, but this was a buyer''s market, there being a lot more oak and a lot more people who had the time to cut it than there was money in southern Michigan. He also trapped the marshes, getting mostly muskrats but always hoping for a then-rare mink. This was wetter and colder work than woodcutting and not much more lucrative, for much the same reasons. Many more people could go out and catch furbearers than could afford to buy fur coats. It took seven or eight muskrat pelts to equal a cord of wood. One mink pelt would do it, but even a good trapper was lucky to get two or three mink a winter in those marshes.
All of this-having his profession vanish, being reduced to doing odd jobs to scrape together four or five dollars a day, never knowing, no matter what he did, when and if conditions would improve-must, I can understand now, have been a gut-wrenching experience for my father. We talked about it only once directly, and that was long after it was over. A war had been fought and good times had returned. People were again hiring landscape architects. He had an office, with draftsmen and a secretary, at which I stopped by during a college vacation. I asked if I could use the cottage (which long before had reverted to summer-only use) for a New Year''s Eve party, and we got to talking about the winters when that had been our only home.
"I''m damn sure I never want to see another depression, and I''d never want you to go through something like that," my father said, "but, in a way, they were some of the best years. I was young, and I actually liked getting out in the marshes running that trapline. I liked cutting trees. It was better exercise than golf and, physically, I felt great after a day in the woods. What I was doing was fun, if I could have done it without worrying. I was always afraid we weren''t going to have enough to eat and that I was going to have to go on relief or the WPA. That time I broke my nose splitting wood, I knew the damn ax was going to break, but I didn''t want to spend the money in a hardware for a handle and I didn''t want to bother making one, so I just put tape on it and the head flew off and conked me. I remember waking up and there I was bleeding like a pig, but I was thinking I''d have to get an ax handle someplace because I had a customer for a couple of cords. Then I really got worried because there might be doctor bills. It seems like you could at least have had a broken nose in peace and quiet but you couldn''t. You went to bed worrying about money, woke up worrying even when you had been conked. The Depression was there all the time."
Now, 30 years after that conversation, I can at least imaginatively comprehend how hard economically and psychologically the times must have been. Yet when they were happening I was oblivious of them. I certainly had no sense of hardship, deprivation or worry. In part this was because I was too young, but it was also because my father made a shield of himself that protected me, body and mind. I have no memory of a harassed, desperate man, though he often must have been so. I remember he was usually laughing, teasing and joking, invariably tolerant and patient. I remember an informative, immensely energetic person who seemed to have an inexhaustible amount of time to spend with me and was having as good a time doing it as I was-which was very good indeed. There were all sorts of good times-riding on a tractor with him, learning to swim, to canoe, to sail, to hit a ball out of a sand trap with a niblick; there were serious discussions about the relative merits of Tommy Bridges and Carl Hubbell; we raced turtles, built castles in the sweet-sour-smelling mounds of oak sawdust, lassoed the Judas goat, and more and more and more.
As things turned out, the most consequential common interest we had was in natural history. Though his formal training was in botany, he was an enormously inquisitive general naturalist. He took me along on his plant-collecting trips if they did not extend too far into too difficult bush. By the time I was in kindergarten I knew the Latin names of a good many southern Michigan species of flora. (After a few years of formal education I forgot most of them, replacing this information with a lot of facts about the principal products of France.) On one of these trips we found a massasauga, the small rattlesnake of the northern wetlands. My father restrained the snake, showed me its distinctive identifying features, explained the properties of its venom and why the animal should be treated with prudence. Then he released the massasauga, at a safe distance. The experience left me with a feeling that rattlesnakes were interesting, if formidable, creatures but in no sense loathsome or scary.
Another day, while my grandfather (a man of the old Cotton Mather that-which-is-not-useful-is-vicious school) was advising poison and shot, my father spent most of a morning digging out a badger that was threatening to undermine the sixth green. As he dug he showed me with enthusiasm the intricacies of the badger''s tunnels. Finally he got the big powerful weasel into a box, and together we drove it to an abandoned farm several miles away where it was released, furious but unharmed.
Through such intimate and instructive encounters I had been introduced, even before I could tie a dependable bowknot in my shoes, to a good many members of the local community of flora and fauna. These early experiences helped shape my own adult interests, my studies and my choice of profession, but more important I now think they created an enduring attitude-in a sense an appetite-that the so-called natural world is an unfailing source of instruction, stimulation, recreation and just pure pleasure. I can think of no better legacy that my father might have left to me.
The fall and winter of 1931 were the worst of the hard times for my family, or so my mother, who was recently consulted about these matters, tells me. There was less money than ever and prospects of getting more were at their bleakest. On top of everything else, winter came early and hard, making it more difficult to cut wood and trap, requiring more heat, light, clothing and thus money. Again, so far as I can recall now, I was oblivious of all of that. I remember only disconnected incidents from that early winter, none of them bad, none related to economic crises. We found a seagull that had become trapped in the shore ice because its webbed feet were cruelly entangled in a bass plug somebody had lost the summer before and which the bird had apparently pounced on hoping to get something to eat. While my father operated to free the barbs, I edged closer, so close that the gull reached out and gouged my hand with a beak that was as strong as and much sharper than a pair of snap-lock pliers. I was proud of the scar for some years.
Somehow my father broke our exuberant Airedale, Mike, to harness, taught him to pull a toboggan-like sled that he sometimes used to carry traps and kindling. After the ice froze solid and if the weather was not too bad, he would hitch up the dog, put me on the sled and we would tour the frozen lake to see what was happening.
Indoors, where I spent more time than usual because of the weather, there were two mouse cages, one of whitefoots and the other of meadow voles, to watch, feed and anthropomorphize with. A flying squirrel ranged more or less freely in the cottage. My mother read to me a lot, especially, I remember, about an Indian duck named Shingibis (spelling doubtful) who engaged in heroic struggles against the cruel and tyrannic North Wind. My mother also recalls this tale clearly, if not so fondly. "I read that story over and over and over until I knew it by heart," she says. "So did you. Sometimes I wished the North Wind would win and freeze that damn duck stiff, but I suppose it was good for me, too. Kept me from thinking about other things."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Natural coincidenceby Bil Gilbert Copyright © 2004 by Bil Gilbert . Excerpted by permission.
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