I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (28 page)

Gerry ambled across to us, displaying a diffident charm that had not been apparent in his online photograph, and introduced himself and his twelve-year-old wagoner's lad Jacob, a brown-eyed, white-smiled Huckleberry Finn with nothing on his feet but filth and scratches. Our greetings were pleasingly low-key, as if this was a rendezvous casually suggested that morning over a shared pot of campfire coffee. Gerry was slighter than I'd expected, the wiry side of trim; ancient, blurred tattoos embellished both leathery forearms. Since that photo had been taken he'd trimmed his shoulder-length side-straggle, thereby granting a clearer view of the cracked and crusted rivulets of dried blood that decorated much of his head, their source an awful crusted wound atop his cranium.

'One of the boys flicked a horn out at a horsefly,' he explained, in a disarmingly cultured murmur. 'Guess I wasn't paying attention.'

'Filled his whole hat with blood!' piped up Jacob, cheerfully awestruck. Gerry shrugged carelessly, showed me a poorly stocked set of front teeth, and told Butch and me of a change in plan: courtesy of some ranger-level bureaucratic stupidity, we were now required to relocate our camp to a distant corner of the forest.

Gerry tossed me a sack of well-used, self-made clothing, then with an air of quiet efficiency I would become very familiar with, set about encouraging a quartet of implacable, van-sized animals into a wheeled cage. Some years before, I had been party to a more modest variant of this challenge, involving a horsebox and a very small donkey; the task had taken three of us, all healthy adults, two profane and increasingly violent hours. In consequence, I watched in awe as with no more than a few whispered words and a prompting tweak on the nosering, the first ox clattered obediently up the ramp.

As he worked, I delved through Gerry's sack in the evening gloom, picking out a pair of heavily patched knee-length grey britches, a set of beige hemp chaps to cover them, white woollen socks and a wide-brimmed brown felt hat of the type a prospector might have worn, with a stubby clay pipe stuck jauntily through two holes in its high, domed crown. Teaming all this with my Kentwell shift and belt – both pre-approved by Gerry – was a process that allowed a dozen bloodsuckers to make their mark about me, and required asking a twelve-year-old boy to tighten my chaps.

Last on were the shoes, thin-soled, brown-suede moccasin-like affairs, with integral straps tied above the ankle. Of everything I'd just put on, these were the only items I'd take off in the ninety-six hours that lay ahead. And this despite my entire wardrobe being comprehensively slathered in cow crap and axle grease before the first of those hours was even fifteen minutes old.

With Gerry leading by very active example, and poor Butch a hobbled spectator, Jacob and I helped persuade the last steaming dun behemoth up a ramp now slick with fresh slurry. Then we crammed ourselves into the pick-up cab and squeaked and rattled away into the empty night, four tons of horned beef lowing behind us.

The magnitude of our primeval playground became apparent in the long drive required to traverse it in search of our redesignated camp area; I learned later that at 3,600km2, the Daniel Boone National Forest is the size of one and a half Luxembourgs.

Hunched over the wheel, Gerry whiled away the journey with a health and safety lecture, one whose downbeat, deadpan tone very much belied its content, focused as this was on the many creatures whose attentions might disfigure us. First up: the brown recluse, an arachnid whose entirely innocuous appearance belied a bite that had accounted for many a Kentuckian limb, as well as the odd chin and nose. When it came to venomous snakes, we'd be spoilt for choice: a month after my return one of his oxen took a copperhead bite and was lame for a fortnight. Gerry's principal tip here was to lift any rocks or logs from the far side first, giving you the opportunity to let go and crush any serpents thus revealed before they went for you.

Bears weren't generally too aggressive at this time, but they'd certainly be around; at his farm over the other side of Kentucky, he shot a couple most years. 'Remember that tub of grease you put in the trailer for me?' I could hardly fail to: much of it, obscurely, was now smeared all over my neck and ears. 'A genuine homemade animal product.' Gerry smiled at the road ahead. After a while he felt obliged to add that the reliable contemporary firearm he had brought along (a
Dirty Harry
Magnum), and the four rounds of ammunition with which it was loaded, was solely reserved for delivering a humane
coup de grâce
to any crippled oxen.

Presently the road nosed out of the forest boundaries, and passed through a sad little town, all flaky weatherboard and rust-blistered enamel, moribund and antiquated as an abandoned
Waltons
set. The volunteer fire truck was listing on two flat tyres, and the General Store had a child's trike in one mottled window and a greying wedding dress in the other. 'You know you're a redneck when there are wheels on your house but not on your car,' said Gerry, as the town gave way to a long stretch of road sporadically lined in this manner. After a few more miles of nothingness a truckstop diner glowed out of the dark, and we pulled in.

Walking into a restaurant dressed as we were, and smelling as we did, would in most other first-world countries have had us arrested, or at least taken into care. It says something about rural Kentucky that our appearance invited no comment, nor even a second glance. 'You doin' good there, boys?' asked a politely bored waitress, and in a minute there I was, eating ribs in Stinky Pete's hat and a pair of steersoiled hemp chaps.

Greasily replete, we headed back into the dark rural enormity, and after a few map-squinting roadside breaks turned off tarmac and on to mud. A long hour later, following a series of treacherous manoeuvrings, Gerry reversed the huge trailer into an area of grass behind a firing range. He led his boys away into the black pasture beyond, while Jacob and I rooted blindly about in the pick-up truck for things to sleep on. Butch could only sit and talk. 'You know, he's just a big old softie,' he said, as Gerry clinked distantly about with ox-tethering picket posts. 'He's had sixteen oxen now and still don't like talking about the ones he's lost.' He chuckled gently. 'Wouldn't think he had four tours of duty in Vietnam behind him.'

Darkness, and the enormous tarpaulin I was carrying, hid my facial reaction to this news. It explained the tattoos, but sat very awkwardly with Gerry's muted erudition. Reconciling the two became yet more of a challenge as Butch sketched out his friend's military CV: twenty-one years in service, many of them as a sergeant in the 'top Special Forces unit in Vietnam'; three serious injuries, including an incident involving white phosphorus that had hospitalised Gerry for a year; a vast haul of decorations. With a deprecatory chortle Butch ended off a one-sentence account of the decade in Missouri that comprised his own Army career. Then he sighed up at the sky, and the drizzle it was starting to leak. 'Yep, Gerry and me, we've been through a lot. Both sixty-two, been re-enacting together for twenty-six years. We're closer than brothers, close as two straight men can be.'

Jacob and I had laid out everything flat we could find – two big tarps, half a dozen rough woollen blankets, a quartet of half-length mattress rolls – when Gerry ambled back. Those of us who were wearing shoes took them off, then we divvied out bedding, rustled around for a bit, and settled down as best we could. The drizzle died away, the clouds moved on and suddenly the upward view was more star than sky. The fireflies came out, the moon was full: just another perfect night out in the God-forsaken depths of
Deliverance
country.

I hoped I'd be too tired to dwell on bears and brown recluses, but soon established I was not. Rustles and creaks assailed us from all sides, some distant, some whimperingly proximate. A hundred tiny legs seemed to scuttle about my person; with sweat pooling into my ears and my limbs in rigid spasm, I restricted myself to just one swift bout of frenzied self-slapping. Would these people ever know what it was costing me to maintain this impression of a happy-go-lucky historical adventurer, feebly unconvincing as it might be? What a merciful relief, at least, to find myself sharing a tarpaulin with one of the world's very hardest bastards. At least until he rolled over, met my blinkless, who-goes-there stare and whispered, 'You know, I never really sleep.'

It was pitch black when the sounds of bovine activity awoke me, though when I removed my hat from my face it most blatantly was not. The rain had returned overnight – hence my repositioned headwear – but had now made way for a clear blue dawn, the sun falling obliquely across the great stretch of gleaming pasture before us, and the mighty wall of muscular vegetation that reared up beyond it.

The jolt of bewilderment that accompanied every re-enactment reveille had never been more highly charged: where the, how the, who the, what in the name of all that was right was I doing here, out in the million-acre back of beyond with only a trio of barefoot extremists and their enormous ginger animals for company?

I surveyed the most proximate of the latter, browsing untethered a few yards from my feet, steamy piss gushing from the tuft of hair that dangled from its pizzle. Only now did I accept the defectiveness of my nocturnal risk assessment – which had, I now recalled, obliged me to re-don my shoes in a moment of small-hours insecurity. As Gerry would later confirm, the dominant bestial threat as we slept was not a brutal or venomous bite, but the benign wanderings of his heavyweight grazers, any of whom might nonchalantly stove in our skulls with a careless hoof. After returning home I learned that death by bovine trampling has accounted for eight British ramblers in the past decade.

We'd left the wagon back at the lakeside car park, and as I laid my wet bedding out in the sun, Gerry and Jacob returned with it in the trailer. Helping to trundle this handsome and evocative vehicle down the ramp, I learned that Gerry had built it himself – all of it, right down to the last iron rivet, cast and tempered in his own forge. Two years toil, from sawing the first plank to painting his initials on the tailgate.

'I guess I'm kind of a fanatic in whatever I do,' he confessed mildly, laying to rest my post-Kentwell terror that with our scenario now established, we might be expected to converse in period tongue. Our correspondence had showcased Gerry's confident grasp of Revolutionary-era language, but in the days ahead the only archaic idiom to pass his blistered lips was the occasional 'good enough'.

I listened in wonder, and a powerful sense of inadequacy, to the whistle-stop tour of Gerry's expansive hinterland that now followed: the mountaineering, the marathon running, the multilingualism (he could make himself understood in half a dozen European tongues, including Norwegian and Polish). And – his first reference to the momentous career encapsulated to me by Butch – the military.

In Vietnam he had spent a year with a remote tribe of former headhunters, training them as scouts to track down VC supply routes; he had also, in one siege, endured 104 consecutive days in wet mud. His post-Nam military career had seen him instructing elite units across the NATO world – the SAS included – on survival techniques and the art of escaping from a POW camp. 'You could say I've built up quite a tolerance for hardship,' he said, as we manhandled the wagon through the damp tussocks. 'Maybe even got a bit of a taste for it.'

More profoundly, these experiences had also left him with a deep-seated, philosophical belief that if only man could look back over his past errors, he might avoid making them again in the future. 'I'm with that guy who said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,' he told me, doubtless well aware who that guy was, but diplomatically allowing me to camouflage my own ignorance with a sage nod.

Breakfast was perspiring cheese and slices of limp sausagemeat, wrapped in a well-used cloth and relieved from one of the many boxes and chests that in the usual manner doubled as fireside seating. I sluiced it down with my first historically legal coffee: a handful of crushed beans brewed up in a blackened billycan hung above a neat little fire Butch had got going as I slept.

The sun climbed, the oxen browsed, Jacob gambolled barefoot through the shiny grass. Round the fire Gerry gamely launched a sadly one-sided debate on the political cartoons of Thomas Rowlandson, all the while pencilling notes and calculations in a little copybook, his handwriting a honed facsimile of the swirls and curlicues of eighteenth-century penmanship. I leaned over for a closer look: he ran a grubby finger down the columns, explaining the bushel maths detailed therein. In the days ahead, Gerry explained, he hoped to establish what was a realistic full load for an ox-drawn wagon, and how far such a vehicle might travel on lonely forest paths between dawn and dusk.

Tilting the billycan dregs into our tin mugs, Gerry laid out the historical context for his latest experiment. By the summer of 1775, Britain's grip on its American colonies had been weakening for some time; it was eighteen months since unenfranchised Bostonians had introduced their native marine life to the stimulating effects of black Bohea tea. In April, a bloody engagement between British troops and patriot militia at Lexington, near Boston, had marked the start of the Revolution's armed phase. 'The shot heard round the world,' was how Ralph Waldo Emerson described the opening salvo, but from what Gerry had to say, the bang didn't reach Kentucky. 'This was the frontier. No one out here would have known or cared about the War of Independence.' Only in 1782, with the war almost won, did Kentucky see any action.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the lonely lands just west of the Appalachian Mountains were known only to the boldest or most desperate pioneers, and hardly familiar even to the Shawnee Indians, the dominant regional tribe, who used the area as a hunting ground but established few permanent settlements. Most auspicious of the select colonials to stride across the Appalachians through the Cumberland Gap was Daniel Boone, a man I was only previously aware of for always getting me mixed up with Davy Crockett, on funnyhat grounds.