American Childhood (15 page)

Y
OUNG CHILDREN HAVE NO SENSE OF WONDER
. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous. Their parents pause at the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating the trees; the children look for something to throw. The children who tape colorful fall leaves to the schoolroom windows and walls are humoring the teacher. The busy teacher halts on her walk to school and stoops to pick up fine bright leaves “to show the children”—but it is she, now in her sixties, who is increasingly stunned by the leaves, their brightness all so much trash that litters the gutter.

This year at the Ellis School my sister Amy was in the fifth grade, with Mrs. McVicker. I remembered Mrs. McVicker fondly. Every year she reiterated the familiar (and, without a description of their mechanisms, the sentimental) mysteries that schoolchildren hear so often and so indifferently: that each snowflake is different, that some birds fly long distances, that acorns grow into oaks. Caterpillars turn into butterflies. The stars are large and very far away. She struck herself like a gong with these same mallets every year—a sweet old schoolteacher whom we in our time had loved and tolerated for her innocence.

Now that I was an aging veteran of thirteen or so, I was becoming case-softened myself. Imperceptibly I had shed my indifference. I was getting positively old: the hatching of wet robins in the spring moved me. I saw them from the school library window, as if on an educational film: a robin sprawled on a nest in the oak, and four miserable hatchlings appeared. They peeped. I knew this whole story; who didn’t?
Nevertheless I took to checking on the robins a few times a day. Their mother rammed worms and bugs down their throats; they grew feathers and began to hop up and down in the nest. Bit by bit they flew away; I saw them from the schoolyard taking test flights under the oak. Glory be, I thought during all those weeks, hallelujah, and never told a soul.

Even my friends began to seem to me marvelous: Judy Schoyer laughing shyly, her round eyes closed, and quick Ellin Hahn, black-haired and ruddy, who bestrode the social world like a Colossus, saying always just the right and funny thing. Where had these diverse people come from, really? I watched little Molly turn from a baby into a child and become not changed so much as ever more herself, kindhearted, nervous, both witty and humorous: was this true only in retrospect? People’s being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously—what was it? Why was it so appealing? Personality, like beauty, was a mystery; like beauty, it was useless. These useless things were not, however, flourishes and embellishments to our life here, but that life’s center; they were its truest note, the heart of its form, which drew back our thoughts repeatedly.

Somewhere between one book and another a child’s passive acceptance had slipped away from me also. I could no longer see the world’s array as a backdrop to my private play, a dull, neutral backdrop about which I had learned all I needed to know. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it. I peered in one day, stepped in the next, and soon wandered in deep over my head. Month after month, year after year, the true and brilliant light, and the complex and multifaceted coloration, of this actual, historical, waking world invigorated me. Its vastness extended everywhere I looked, and precisely where I looked, just as forms grew under my gaze as I drew.

This was the enthusiasm of a child, like that of a field-working scientist, and like that of the artist making a pencil study. One took note; one took notes. The subject of the
study was the world’s things: things to sort into physical categories, and things to break down into physical structures.

I was not to discover literature and ideas for a few more years. All I had awakened to was the world’s wealth of information. I was reading books on drawing, painting, rocks, criminology, birds, moths, beetles, stamps, ponds and streams, medicine. (Somehow I missed those other childhood mainstays, astronomy, coins, and dinosaurs.) How I wished I could find agreeable books on thin air! For everything, I had gathered, was something. And for me, during those few years before I vanished into a blinded rage, everything was interesting.

Nothing could be less apparently interesting, for example, than a certain infuriatingly dull sight I always looked at with hatred. It was raining and Mother was driving us along one of Pittsburgh’s clogged narrow highways. I looked out through the rain on the window and saw by the roadside the raw cuts the road builders carved through the rolling rocky hills, carved long dreary decades ago, to lay the road. Blasting bores scarred these banks of sandstone and shale in streaks; gritty rain streamed down their cut faces and dissolved the black soot and coal dust and car exhaust. The car stopped and started. I stared dully through the spotted windshield. Gray rivulets poured down the rock, mile after highway mile, and puddled at the berm where the rock met the winter-killed grass and mud.

This sight slew me in my seat. It was so dull it unstrung me, so I could barely breathe. How could I flee it, the very landscape, the dull rock, the bleak miles, the dark rain? I slumped under the weight of my own passive helplessness. Sometimes I memorized billboards. I tried traveling with my eyes closed, and that was even worse.

But now I knew that even rock was interesting—at least in theory. Mr. Pough and Herr Mohs could stand here mightily in the rain, singing songs and swinging picks into the rock cuts by the side of the road. Even I could tap some shale just right, rain or shine, and open the rock to bones of fossil fish. There might be trilobites on the hilltops, star sapphires. Right
along these wretched rainy roads, Mohs and Pough could have, as the saying went, a field day.

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals—then what wasn’t?

Everything in the world, every baby, city, tetanus shot, tennis ball, and pebble, was an outcrop of some vast and hitherto concealed vein of knowledge, apparently, that had compelled people’s emotions and engaged their minds in the minutest detail without anyone’s having done with it. There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth—fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness. There was no one here but us fanatics: bird-watchers, infielders, detectives, poets, rock collectors, and, I inferred, specialists in things I had not looked into—violin makers, fishermen, Islamic scholars, opera composers, people who studied Bali, vials of air, bats. It seemed to take all these people working full time to extract the interest from everything and articulate it for the rest of us.

Every least thing I picked up was proving to be the hanging end of a very long rope.

For the sentimental Mrs. McVicker I had written on assignment a paper on William Gorgas—the doctor in charge of workers’ health during the digging of the Panama Canal. Liking that, I wrote another, on Walter Reed. The struggle against yellow fever fired me, and I retained an interest in medicine, especially epidemiology. So now, a few years later, on the couch on the sunporch, I was reading Paul de Kruif’s overwrought
Microbe Hunters
.

Old Anton Leeuwenhoek looked through his lenses at a drop of rainwater and shouted to his daughter, “Come here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rainwater!…They swim! They play around!” His microscope “showed little things to him with a fantastic clear enormousness.” My
microscope was similar. Since I had found the amoeba, I regularly found little animals. I found them in rainwater. I let a bowl of rainwater sit by the basement furnace for a week. When I examined a drop at low power, sure enough, little animals swam, and played around, with fantastic clear enormousness.

Not only was the roadside rock interesting; even the rainwater that streamed down its cut face was interesting. Mineral crystals made the rock; lively animals made the rain. Now when I traveled the grim highways and saw the dull rock receive the dull rain, and realized there would be nothing else to look at until we got where we were going, and Mother and I were all talked out—now when I felt the familiar restless hatred begin to rise at the stupidity and ugliness of this sight, I bade myself look directly at some streaky rock cut and said to myself, thundered to myself, “Think!”

Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.

At school I saw a searing sight. It turned me to books; it turned me to jelly; it turned me much later, I suppose, into an early version of a runaway, a scapegrace. It was only a freshly hatched Polyphemus moth crippled because its mason jar was too small.

The mason jar sat on the teacher’s desk; the big moth emerged inside it. The moth had clawed a hole in its hot cocoon and crawled out, as if agonizingly, over the course of an hour, one leg at a time; we children watched around the desk, transfixed. After it emerged, the wet, mashed thing turned around walking on the green jar’s bottom, then painstakingly climbed the twig with which the jar was furnished.

There, at the twig’s top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings. When it spread those wings—those beautiful wings—blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings’ frail sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. But the moth could not spread its wide wings at all; the jar was too small. The wings could not fill, so they hardened while they were still crumpled from the cocoon. A
smaller moth could have spread its wings to their utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no mason jar. It would have been big as a wren.

The teacher let the deformed creature go. We all left the classroom and paraded outside behind the teacher with pomp and circumstance. She bounced the moth from its jar and set it on the school’s asphalt driveway. The moth set out walking. It could only heave the golden wrinkly clumps where its wings should have been; it could only crawl down the school driveway on its six frail legs. The moth crawled down the driveway toward the rest of Shadyside, an area of fine houses, expensive apartments, and fashionable shops. It crawled down the driveway because its shriveled wings were glued shut. It crawled down the driveway toward Shadyside, one of several sections of town where people like me were expected to settle after college, renting an apartment until they married one of the boys and bought a house. I watched it go.

I knew that this particular moth, the big walking moth, could not travel more than a few more yards before a bird or a cat began to eat it, or a car ran over it. Nevertheless, it was crawling with what seemed wonderful vigor, as if, I thought at the time, it was still excited from being born. I watched it go till the bell rang and I had to go in. I have told this story before, and may yet tell it again, to lay the moth’s ghost, for I still see it crawl down the broad black driveway, and I still see its golden wing clumps heave.

I had not suspected, among other things, that moths came so big. From a school library book I learned there were several such enormous American moths, all wild silk moths which spun cocoons, and all common.

Gene Stratton Porter’s old
Moths of the Limberlost
caught my eye; for some years after I read it, it was my favorite book. From one of its queer painted photographs I learned what the Polyphemus moth would have looked like
whole: it was an unexpected sort of beauty, brown and wild. It had pink stripes, lavender crescents, yellow ovals—all sorts of odd colors no one would think to combine. Enormous blue eye-spots stared eerily from its hind wings. Coincidentally, it was in the Polyphemus chapter that the book explained how a hatched moth must spread its wings quickly, and fill them with blood slowly, before it can fly.

Gene Stratton Porter had been a vigorous, loving kid who grew up long ago near a swampy wilderness of Indiana, and had worked up a whole memorable childhood out of insects, of all things, which I had never even noticed, and my childhood was half over.

When she was just a tot, she learned how entomologists carry living moths and butterflies without damaging them. She commonly carried a moth or butterfly home from her forest and swamp wanderings by lightly compressing its thorax between thumb and index finger. The insect stops moving but is not hurt; when you let it go, it flies away.

One day, after years of searching, she found a yellow swallowtail. This is not the common tiger swallowtail butterfly, but
Papilio turnus:
“the largest, most beautiful butterfly I had ever seen.” She held it carefully in the air, its wings high over the back of her fingers. She wanted to show the fragile, rare creature to her father and then carry it back to precisely where she found it. But she was only a child, and so she came running home with it instead of walking. She tripped, and her fingers pinched through the butterfly’s thorax. She broke it to pieces. And that was that. It was like one of Father’s bar jokes.

There was a terror connected with moths that attracted and repelled me. I would face down the terror. I continued reading about moths, and branched out to other insects.

I liked the weird horned beetles rumbling along everywhere, even at the country club, whose names were stag, elephant, rhinoceros. They were so big I could hear them walk; their sharp legs scraped along the poolside concrete. I liked the comical true bugs, like the red-and-blue-striped leafhoppers, whose legs looked like yellow plastic; they
hopped on roses in the garden at home. At Lake Erie I watched the solitary wasps that hunted along the beach path; they buried their paralyzed caterpillar prey in holes they dug so vigorously the sand flew. I even liked the dull little two-winged insects, the diptera, because this order contained mosquitoes, about several species of which I knew something because they bore interesting diseases. I studied under the microscope our local mosquitoes in various stages—a hairy lot—dipped in a cup from Molly’s wading pool.