Looking Back Read online

  Witches … vampires … with station breaks in between. Our 1960s upbringing has left us disbelieving and gullible at the same time, ready to accept everything or nothing.

  Pollution and overpopulation have built up slowly, but our awareness of them came all at once, in 1969. Suddenly the word ecology was everywhere. We were juniors the year we all read Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and felt again the kind of fear that hadn’t really touched us since the air-raid drills of 1962. Not personal, individual fear but end-of-the-world fear, that by the time we were our parents’ age we would be sardine-packed and tethered to our gas masks in a skyless cloud of smog. Partly because the idea of pollution hit us so suddenly, and from behind (just when we were alerted to the possibility of quite a different kind of shock, and expending our fury over the war), the realization that our resources were disappearing hit us hard. We were a generation unused to thinking ahead, incapable of visualizing even our twenties, and faced suddenly with the prospects of the year 2000 and forced, in youth, to contemplate the bleakness of our middle age.

  We were raised to trust science and technology above all else, and now scientists and technologists were telling us that almost nothing could be done to save us. It seemed unfair that this should happen in our lifetimes when it was not our fault—that we should limit ourselves to just two children to make up for past generations that didn’t. For the first time in my life, I remember wishing I’d been born in an earlier time and being thankful that at least I hadn’t been born ten years later. All my sensibilities were heightened—sometimes I caught myself aware of my breathing (an act I’d never really thought about); I began to notice trash cans and litter baskets and pregnant women (there seemed so many of them. I was indignant—they were using up the quota, filling spaces that should have been left for the children of my friends and me).

  Like one of Dr. Kildare’s cancer patients, I felt condemned to death. Hope was held out, of course. There was Earth Day, celebrated at our school by the announcement that no one was to drive his car that day, and by a litter clean-up campaign that lasted for two hours while we attacked the beer cans on one half-mile stretch of highway. The president of our Environment Protection club (every new cause becomes a club sooner or later, and ends up holding dances) announced that we could help by cutting down on electric power, giving up our hairdryers and radios for the sake of A Better Tomorrow and boycotting the soft drinks in the non-recyclable containers. Halfheartedly I went through the motions, but my sacrifices seemed too far removed, too small a drop in the bucket. The fact that, if everybody did it, our resources would be saved (“Somebody has to be first …” said our club president) meant little when, looking over your shoulder, you’d notice no one following. The connection between cause and effect was impossible to see and so, like the taking of vitamins (another never-wholly-real or trusted activity I went through without apparent benefit) my litter picking and boycotting grew less and less fervent. The old hopeless urgency expired; we’d almost grown accustomed to our death sentences.

  We feel cheated, many of us—the crop of 1953—which is why we complain about inheriting problems we didn’t cause. (Childhood notions of justice, reinforced by Perry Mason, linger on. Why should I clean up someone else’s mess? Who can I blame?) We’re excited also, of course: I can’t wait to see how things turn out. But I wish I weren’t quite so involved, I wish it weren’t my life that’s being turned into a suspense thriller.

  AT SEVENTEEN, IN MY senior year, I left Oyster River High and entered Phillips Exeter Academy. Something strange got into the boys that year, as if, along with the legendary salt peter, something like lust for the country was being sprinkled into the nightly mashed potatoes. It wasn’t just the overalls (with a tie on top to meet the dress code) or the country music that came humming out of every dorm. Exonians—Jonathan Juniors and Carter the Thirds, Latin scholars and mathematicians with 800s on their college boards—were suddenly announcing to the college placement counselor that no, they didn’t want a Harvard interview, not now or ever. Hampshire, maybe (that’s the place where you can go and study Eastern religion or dulcimer-making). But many weren’t applying anyplace—they were going to study weaving in Norway, to be shepherds in the Alps, deckhands on a fishing boat or—most often—farmers. After the first ecological fury died down, after Ehrlich’s Population Bomb exploded, that’s what we were left with. Prep school boys felt it more than most, perhaps, because they, more than most, had worked their minds at the expense of their hands. And now, their heads full of theorems and declensions, they wanted to get back to the basics—to the simple, honest, uncluttered life where manure was cow shit, not bovine waste.

  Exeter’s return to the soil took the form of the farm project; a group of boys who got together sold a few stocks, bought a red pick-up truck and proposed, for a spring project, that they work a plot of school-owned land a few miles out of town. The country kids I went to Oyster River with, grown up now and working in the shoe factory or married—they would have been amused at the farming fairy tale. In March, before the ice thawed, the harvest was already being planned. The faculty protested and the project died, and most—not all—went on to college in the fall. (They talk now, from a safe distance, about the irrelevances of Spenser and the smell of country soil and fresh-cut hay.) A friend who really did go on to farming came to visit me at college the next fall. He looked out of place in the dorm; he put his boots up on my desk and then remembered he had cow dung on the soles. He laughed when I reminded him about the farm project. It’s best they never tried, I think. That way, in ten years, when they’re brokers, they’ll still have the dream: tomatoes big as pumpkins, pumpkins big as suns and corn that’s never known the touch of blight.

  When I was eighteen, a friend who was a debutante that year invited me to the Junior League’s annual coming-out ball. I almost didn’t go—I didn’t have a dress or shoes; I worried about whether to wear gloves or not, and how to avoid wearing my yellow vinyl jacket if it rained. I borrowed a dress, finally, bought shoes, pinned up my hair and, since it didn’t rain, went coatless, hoping the hole in my gloves and the grape juice stain on my skirt wouldn’t show, marking me instantly, among the debutantes and Honored Guests, for what I was—a slightly second-hand outsider.

  I needn’t have worried about that. I may have stood out, but if I did, it was because I’d overdressed. The ones who really belonged wore their hair down, kicked off their shoes, compared one another’s rummage-sale bow ties and baggy dinner jackets. The debutantes, many of them, made loud and laughing explanations why they’d come out at all (“Isn’t it the silliest thing you’ve ever heard?!!!”) and tried as nearly as they could to disassociate themselves from everything that had made them Junior Leaguers in the first place. Money and social position—earned with such unquestioning struggle by our parents’ generation—is for us (now that we have it, if we do) something of an embarrassment. We have not gone through the Depression or walked ten miles to school or eaten bacon fat for supper. Whether or not we’re rich—and I’m speaking not just for the few who are—not many of us grew up really poor. (Deprivation was a fifty-cent allowance and a black and white TV.) So we don’t have the respect for money that our parents had. In fact, it’s more a source of guilt. We use it, of course, for our European summers, our college educations, our hairdryers and electric typewriters and ten-speed bicycles, but we romanticize the lives of those without it—people who we, the young, affluent and educated, see with a new sentimentality for The Great Midwest, as the Real Americans inhabiting The Real World. The self-employed farmer, the truck-stop waitress, the lobster fisherman—they are perhaps the closest thing my generation has to heroes.

  We play at poverty, proudly broadcasting the occasional destitution brought on by the unexpected expense of a new needle for the stereo or tires for the car; we speak—in front of blacks particularly—of how we never could have gone to college without such a good scholarship. Summers we go slumming as waitresses and construction workers
; back at school we reminisce about our happy days as “menials” (“It’s such a great feeling, working with your hands …”), the fondness coming from the knowledge we won’t be spending our whole lives waiting on tables, living off tips and leftover soup du jour. I cannot really criticize—I do it too—but I can comment. It would be silly to wish we didn’t have the comfort we have. I could wish, though, that, having it, we didn’t pretend otherwise. Admiring poverty or simplicity for its own sake, with guilt and condescension, seems misguided. What we’re really doing is acting poor and living rich, scorning money while living as tidily subsidized students, getting paid simply to read and think.

  Our snobbery has reversed itself now so that, while ghetto inhabitants still strive for Cadillacs, the rest—the ones who have the luxury not to care—are buying ’57 Chevys. Shabby overalls that show the mark of having worked the fields and ankle-length cotton dusters, faded from a hundred washings, and denim work shirts with the elbows worn right through are more than fashion fads, they’re evidences of this playing-poor routine. Some of us cultivate it in our speech—twanging a little, saying our -ing words southern style, like huntin’, readin’, farmin’ and, a favorite verb, “truckin.” To us—the summer-vacation home-folk, the weekend farmers, the rummage sale customers who pay by check—a gas-pump job seems almost romantic and hitchhiking is the preferred means of travel, not because it’s cheaper but because it’s how you meet “the real people.”

  Just about every suburban-born, college-bred boy I know has a hitchhiking story about “this real great truck driver” he met, the kind of salt-of-the-earth, natural man who hasn’t read a book in twenty years but who, his hitchhiking passengers tell me, “knows what it’s all about.” He’s usually called Joe or Red, this potato-and-beef hauling everyman, and his life’s a little tragic (he sleeps in the cab of his truck and spends Christmas on the road, staring out at colored lights blinking through windows), but it is simple, honest, free. He is a philosopher of the road who has given the boy—because this boy is special—some parting nugget of Truth as he lets him out at Exit 1 for New Haven or Exit 23 for Cambridge, some words of wisdom the boy now imparts to me, over coffee and deeply inhaled nonfilter cigarettes in the campus grill.

  We’re all in search of sages. Information surrounds us. Facts about North Vietnamese dead and grams of carbohydrate in Rice Krispies and points lost on the stock exchange and TV stars’ divorces are drilled into us like lists of vocabulary words for college boards. Oh, the new trend in education, while we were in school, leaned toward “concepts” and away from what we called “specifics.” Vagueness—we called it bullshitting—was often easy on our high school essay question exams. But in spite of the generalities we met with at school, there was a feeling of being overwhelmed by details. Every succeeding generation has just that many more years of history to study—more presidents, more planets (Pluto had not yet been discovered when my father was in school. Neither had DNA). We were bombarded outside the classroom most of all by—it’s a cliché, but it’s true too—the constantly expanding forces of the media, magazines too numerous to fit in the racks, TVs in every house and even, later, in a lot of dormitory rooms and car radios we’re so accustomed to that only when they’re turned off do we notice they were on. A whole new area of expertise has been developed (it should be a college major, and will be someday soon, perhaps): the field of trivia. TV game shows, awarding cars and minks and refrigerator-freezers to the ones who know the most cereal-box-type information, have glorified it for us. Watching those shows I am amazed to discover how much I know, without knowing I knew it. I answer bonus questions without thinking, like the reincarnated Bridey Murphy speaking in a dialect she claimed she’d never heard.

  All of which cannot help cluttering the mind. It’s an unscientific notion that, like a cupboard, the brain has only so many shelves, before things start to crowd and fall out, but I often get the feeling that I haven’t space left to spread out my thoughts and see what I have. Loose links clanking in my head, and no chain, I long for—capital W—Wisdom. We all do, I think, in this era of overly data-processed, glutted computers. Teachers were rarely funds of knowledge for us (they seldom knew more than what the textbooks taught, keeping one step ahead, reading the chapters a day before they were assigned). Parents, cautioned in the age of permissiveness not to overburden with advice, and confused, themselves, sometimes to the point of despair, could give little. The venerable God died during our youth. (I still remember the orange and black cover of Time magazine one week—“Is God Dead?”—the phrase and the notion were brand-new then, and though he’d never been alive for me in the first place, the idea of his death, death of one of the few existing sages—even a mythical one—disturbed me.)

  Indeed, so many of our childhood authority figures made a point of not being profound, wary of being laughed at for seriousness by what they took to be a sharp, tough, unsentimental bunch of smart-aleck cynics. Actually, we didn’t turn out that way at all. My contemporaries surprise me for what is at times their mushiness—their damp-eyed reading of Love Story and the thin volumes of Rod McKuen’s emaciated poetry; their trust in the occult and all things astrological, following the daily horoscope with a faith they never gave, when we were younger and regarded as more gullible, to fortune-cookie prophecies and tea-leaf aphorisms.

  The absence of true sages—men of deep sensibility, even, in our lives—leads us to make false gods of rock poets and grade-B philosophers, injecting comics and children’s books with significance their authors never knew they had. We, who so hated school, are in search now of teachers. An apricot-robed, lotus-folded guru with a name too long to pronounce, an old man on a park bench, with a beard if possible, a plain-talking, no-nonsense Maine farmer with a pitchfork in his hand, the author of any slim volume of austere prose or poetry (the fewer words he writes, the more profound each one must be)—we attend their words so abjectly, sometimes even literally sit at their feet, waiting for any crumb of what will pass as wisdom to be offered us.

  I remember a show-and-tell day when I was in fourth grade. I brought in a pot holder I’d woven, someone displayed a sea anemone and someone else explained the engine of his model car, and one boy brought his rosary beads and his crucifix, and took from his wallet a photograph of his priest and himself beside their church. We were all too stunned to laugh at first, but then the giggling started, until we were all hiccuping and one boy had to run off to the bathroom without waiting for a pass, and even the teacher was smiling, because religion was something shameful, the soft underside some of us had, but kept concealed, certainly. (Going to church was OK, like going to Brownies. But to speak, as Ralphie Leveque did, of loving God and of the blood of Christ, and Mary’s tears and thorns and nails—that seemed almost dirty.)

  Now, while the fourth graders might still giggle, Jesus has come out of the closet. The disenchanted, and the ones never enchanted in the first place, are returning to the fold with a passion their once-a-week religious parents never possessed. It is a sign of many things: an attempt to purify the spirit, to be drenched in holy waters after a drug-filled adolescence, a form of the new nostalgia, even—almost camp. What’s really going on, though, in the Jesus movement, is our search for a prophet, for someone who can, for a change, tell us the answers. (The big line, in our school days, was “There is no one right answer. What’s your opinion?”) After so many unprofound facts and so much loose, undisciplined freedom, it’s comforting to have a creed to follow and a cross to bear.

  Take a look at the windows of any up-to-date department store and you’ll discover plenty about the mood of the country. For a while it was China—not just summit meetings with Chou En-lai, but stuffed pandas and (Mrs. Mao Tse-tung would be amused) newly stylish workers’ pajamas just like the ones they wear in China. Pregnancy-simulating pillows (worn under smocks) were surely some kind of reaction to ZPG and abortion. First midiskirts, then hotpants told us something about the ups and downs of mood and daring; and now, well, n
ow it’s children’s clothes. Not for children. They are busy transcending childhood with toddler-sized bikinis and bell bottoms. But grown-ups and almost-grown-ups are turning, in this over-sophisticated world, to the reassuring simplicity of childhood. As I write this, the store windows are filled with pinafores and puffed sleeves, smocks and knee socks and Mary Janes and ponytails tied with ribbons or held in place with a plastic rabbit. Colors are pale pink and sky-blue and Easter-chick yellow; prints show Mickey Mouse and lollipops. Kids are in.

  The trend goes beyond fashion. On college campuses there’s a sudden interest in children—not in the detached, analytical perspective of child psychology, but in a way that attempts to recapture childhood for its students. (One of Yale’s most popular seminars during my freshman year was a study of children’s literature.) Students are far less likely to carry Piaget or Bruner than Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Winnie the Pooh, The Little Prince. They write dissertations on comic books and tune in daily to “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street” (particularly good when stoned). It isn’t just camp either; camp is for the cool steel-and-plastic territory of Andy Warhol and Ultra Violet. No tongue-in-cheek, no put-ons, no kidding: childhood and children are serious subjects.