Roadside Rest

ROADSIDE REST Forget Those Good Old Golden Days

August. A mile high. Noon. Twenty miles from town. Air temperature: 72° F. Beer temperature: 45° F.

What tranquility. What beauty. Seated, I lean back against a black walnut trunk and absorb the panorama. Beneath a turquoise and cotton sky, a flowerstrewn meadow stretches to the edge of a handsome pine forest.

The tree line half hides a tumbledown farmhouse, delineated by leaning walls, ruptured porch, holed roof, rotting floors. Shrouds of wild grape festoon rambling, unpruned rose bushes and half-dead apple trees. And only the snap of a flycatcher and the roll of distant thunder interrupt the midday quiet.

Ah, I think, what a perfect retreat from the frantic pace and terrible pressure of modern living . . . .

Abruptly, the ghost of a bearded, stooped settler, dressed in denim overalls, stomps through the gaping front doorway of his cabin. He cups his hands to his mouth and shouts in my direction: "Fraud! Phony! Faker!"

"Hey, wait a minute, Ghost," I object. "Why are you yelling at me?"

"Because I'm fed up with you soft, pampered city dudes relaxing under my tree and feeling sorry for yourselves."

"Well," I argue, "we bear great burdens. The world seems to be moving too fast nowadays. People everywhere are enduring unprecedented strain. They are cracking up and burning out. Contemporary beings no longer find peaceful moments to refresh their psyches. We scarcely will gain control of our 20th-century problems before we have to cope with the looming challenges of the 21st."

"Haw! What makes your generation believe it inherited more than its ration of tension?"

I reply, "Everybody says so. It must be true. You pick up the journals or turn on television, and it's all about the conflicts of the cities, corruption of the system, hazards of pollution, impacts on the environment, defeat of the individual. And so much more."

Ghost laughs bitterly and jeers, "Let me tell you about the concerns and duties of my day.

"I got up at 4:30 and made the fire and fetched the water and milked the cow. Then I fed the stock and slopped the hogs and chopped some wood. I hitched the team and plowed the field and mended fence.

"Then I had my own breakfast."

"I planted crops by hand. I hoed weeds. I trapped wolves and fought bears and shot lions that carried off my calves. I harvested, if the drought and bugs left me anything to harvest, and then I took my crops to the market, if there was a market,"

"My wife baked bread and canned vegetables and crocked eggs. She churned butter, filled lamps, carried ashes, ground coffee, killed snakes, made soap, and scrubbed clothes on a washboard. She felt old when she was 30.

"We had a 15 percent mortgage at the bank and an unpaid bill at the general store. No cash. And no government subsidy or welfare department standing between us and hunger,"

"Do you believe Nature is always a benevolent old gal? Why, one year we were burned out by a forest fire sparked by lightning, and the next year we lost our barn in a flood because there wasn't any dam,"

I perceive a chink in the specter's argument, and I blurt, "But you didn't have to live with the threat of nuclear extinction!" Ghost squints and retorts, "Do you honestly believe a hydrogen bomb is any more deadly than cholera? A hundred miles from the nearest doctor, we watched our kids perish of diseases that didn't even have names, let alone cures. Those who survived had to work like slaves, and miss out on education beyond the three Rs. Do your children actually believe that their times are worse than ever before?"

"But Ghost," I plead, "ours is a complex society. You lived in the golden age of the independent farmer. Maybe you didn't have electricity, or mechanized equipment, or modern home conveniences, or wonder drugs, or rapid communication and transportation, or educational opportunities, or culture and entertainment. But what of your pure pleasures? Your wholesome rewards? Your moments of satisfying reflection?"

"What would you know of hardship and anxiety?" Ghost shot back. "To guarantee a supply of cool water for my family, I had to dig this well by hand. I sank it down 45 feet, until the window of blue sky above me was half the size of my hand. When I hit the water table I had to dig some more, always worrying about the watersoaked sides caving in. With a rope and a bucket, my bride hauled up the mud and sent down the rock for lining the walls. Tell me again about the risks and frustrations of modern living."

I make one more try. "It's a rat race," I say, "some kind of hassle all the time, and no letup."

"Poppycock," jeers Ghost. "In 40 years, I never had a minute to sit down under that walnut tree.

"Now git off'n my place."