I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (31 page)

The military veterans I'd mixed with in Denmark and Leicestershire were attracted to re-enactment by a nostalgia for hard-bitten, tough-talking camaraderie. This clearly wasn't what Gerry was looking for – apart from anything else, the worst I heard him say in five days was 'oh, shoot'. As he spoke, I understood that experiments like these – he called them 'adventures' – were a unique opportunity to meld the keen socio-historical knowledge so diligently accrued after his military days, with the low-tech survival skills he'd honed during them.

Thinking back through Butch's doomsday vigil round at Gerry's on the eve of the millennium, and Gerry's pronouncements on the first world's shiftless decadence, I recalled that the only story he'd ever told me twice was the one in which his boys hauled a crashed Jeep out of a ravine, after all mechanical rescue attempts failed. I had a sense that if not quite looking forward to a post-oil lifestyle meltdown, or something even more dramatic, they were at least relishing the challenges that such a scenario would bring, while the rest of us sat in front of blank TV screens and cried ourselves to death.

We harvested sumac, ate hot cheese, chased butterflies, turned for home. Jacob tired of our slothful progress and jogged off back to camp. At sweaty length, we led the boys up the penultimate hill; we were leading them down when I received a hot, wet nudge in the back of the head.

I turned to behold a jostling stampede at memorably close quarters: a looming logjam of minotaur heads, their expressions for once conveying more than vacant indifference. The wagon seemed much closer to the boys than it should have been; pairing this with their ragged and increasingly rapid progress I quickly saw the need to distance myself from the scene forthwith. I was fifty yards downhill and scrabbling blindly away into the trees when with a mighty whoa and a scuffling, creaking clatter of hooves and wheels, Gerry brought the runaway to a halt. By the time I crept back his incident investigation was complete: a single crooked link had detached itself, thereby loosening the rear two oxen from the wagonpole. We found it 200 yards back up the path. 'If we'd had horses, that would have been a whole mountain of trouble,' said Gerry, though a wing-mirror check soon after showed that this apparently inconsequential alarum had drained all colour from my cheeks – and after three unwashed days in the broiled woods, and three fireside nights in a field full of crap, that meant an awful lot of draining.

Butch had fallen off the covered wagon in our absence: we found him drinking Mountain Dew and wearing bifocals. We didn't say anything. His worst leg was propped up on a wooden chest, his suffering plain to behold. He'd already boiled us up some rice, and in the chirping dusk we bulked this up with a few hunks of sausage and doled it out into our grimy bowls.

Because it wasn't raining, I'd blithely volunteered to wash up. The creek recommended for this chore lay at the outer reaches of our pasture, but, reluctant to invade the realm of the eight-foot black king, I had yet to locate it. Burdened with directions and a great stack of greasy, smutted cookware, I set off; twilight and the thrashing scuffles it brought slowed my pace and catalysed a rapid and unstoppable haemorrhage of exploratory zeal. As soon as the campfire was out of sight, I did a bad thing: I dropped the whole lot into a big puddle and thrashed it with a stick. I was blindly rinsing off bits of cholera with what was left in my canteen when a now familiar enquiry rang distantly out through the gloaming: 'Everything OK back there?'

Gerry had a tin of baccy in his lap when I got back, and, having hidden my load of shame in our camp's darkest corner, I pulled the clay pipe from my hat and requested a pinch. At this stage of my intoxicant famine, it was any port in a storm – even if that meant clearing a fluffy spider's nest out of the bowl to make room for my drugs. 'Mild, and a little on the sweet side' had been Gerry's assessment of the local tobacco – thus reassured I drew in a huge lungful through that dusty little tube, then coughed it straight back out so violently that my hat fell off into the fire. It was the right way to end my last full day in 1775.

I wondered how the Frontier Reform Church would handle Sunday, and after an entirely glorious blue-skied reveille I found out. 'We might be in the wilderness,' called Butch from the fire, 'but that's no excuse to disrespect the Sabbath.' Butch had a small and very old bible in his hand; Gerry was shaving with a mug of hot water and a deeply worrisome cut-throat razor. When he was done he handed both to me without a word. I gingerly scraped the fun-sized machete down both cheeks and across my upper lip, but baulked at the more challengingly three-dimensional sections, thus bequeathing myself an Amish-effect face-girdler.

Butch gathered us all forth to the fireside, laboriously thumbed through his bible, and in a practised mumble, began to read. The following twenty minutes included many repetitions of the phrase 'for his mercy endures forever'; at one point, Moses sacrificed an ox, and sprinkled his people with its blood. Communion followed: half a cracker and a nip of very diluted brandy.

A year before, I would have found such an intimate religious gathering unendurably awkward. But with the sun on my back and a gentle fire at my feet, Butch's unhurried psalms seemed warmly consoling – inestimably more so than Brother Balthasar's hungover medieval dronings in that frosted dungeon.

Contemplating the forest around, I felt a surge of reverence for the religious refugees who founded the nation – driven away from their homelands and out across a savage ocean, then pitching up in this dumbfounding virgin wilderness. If it seemed like God's country to them, I could understand why just a few short centuries on the Lord's word still rang out in the Farmer's Christian Academy, or the Antioch Baptist Chapel, or any of the bland, low-slung, motel-like places of worship that bookended every town. Later, when I discreetly commended Jacob for his fidgetless placidity throughout the service, he frowned at me a little suspiciously, then described the five-hour round trip to church that dominated his Sundays at home.

Butch eased the Good Book closed, fixed his congregation with a probing stare, then launched into a sermon that amplified his reverential mumble to a bible-bashing bellow. 'We've all succumbed to a social disease!' he began, and in alarm I readied myself to shield Jacob's sensibilities by clamping my hands over his ears, or maybe – please no – his eyes. 'These days it's always gotta be somebody else's job to do things for you! Well, I'm not going to be holy for you – you've gotta go and be holy people for yourself!' And having expressed his fundamental disillusionment with the feckless modern world, Butch wound things up with a protracted emphysemic wheeze.

Packing up our makeshift travellers' camp didn't take long: pots and provisions crammed into wooden chests, flagons corked, the fire doused. Squeezing four boys and their wagon into the livestock trailer was the principal challenge, and one that left me slathered in khaki awfulness. Seeing them cooped up in a cage, my principal emotion was not compassion, but relief; a companionable way with domestic beasts was another ingrained human skill that seemed too deeply buried within me to exhume. I preferred my livestock dead.

When the others were in the pick-up and ready to go, I jogged behind a tree to decontaminate exposed flesh with the last of my wet wipes; I was finishing up when a spider – an innocuous brown spider – darted into the linen haversack at my feet. Showing a marked lack of concern for the wooden utensils contained therein, I reflexively brought my right foot down hard upon the bag from a great height, and then again, and again, and again. Many stamps later, panting and wild-eyed as I extended a tentative finger towards the carrying strap, a car door clunked open and a mild voice called out: 'Everything OK back there?'

And so we juddered off down the trail, leaving behind us a field full of ox pats, and 1,100lb of rice chaff smouldering on the embers of the road gang's fire. Watching our pasture disappear behind the oaks, I ran the historical rule over my 1775 experience. In many ways I'd gone backwards since 1578: living rough in the primeval woods, the forest floor around speckled with freshly shattered Stone Age tools and the spoor of animals long since hunted to extinction back in England. My 200-year-old shirt was still in fashion, as were the utensils in the bag at my feet, whatever remained of them. The rising sun still woke me up, and the campfire had returned as the focus of all social activity. The printed philosophy in Gerry's knapsack aside, almost nothing had changed since the Iron Age. Significantly, the principal lifestyle modification was an enhanced range of mood-altering substances: alcohol was all about unwinding, but now there were stimulants, coffee and tobacco, ingested to make men work harder and faster.

Out of the gloomy redneck woods, on to the open road and a distant, heat-hazed horizon – a disorientating, almost agoraphobic prospect after four days hemmed in by treetrunks. Shoulder to soiled shoulder with Jacob in the rear seat, I gazed out at a series of successively tidier small towns: rocking chairs on stoops, Stars and Stripes on gate posts, a sign for Knob Lick ('Everything OK back there?'). We stopped to refuel, and when the tubby forecourt attendant passed my open window I caught a quick draught of soapy, aromatic freshness. When he passed by again I sniffed more deeply: here was a fat man who stood in the sun all day pumping hydrocarbons, yet he smelt gorgeous; it was all I could do to stop myself making that Hannibal Lecter noise. The olfactory rationale made itself plain four hours later, when our entrance divided a busy interstate McDonald's into two distantly separated camps: those who had spent five days wallowing in their own filth and that of four gingery behemoths, and those who hadn't, and suddenly weren't hungry.

Gerry had stoutly insisted on driving me to my airport hotel, and to save the rest of his party a needless three-hour round trip that meant unhitching the trailer in the McDonald's car park. It also meant taking off all of my clothes in this same location, in order to return his toxically soiled outfit. I won't pretend that pulling on a clean T-shirt and shorts felt anything other than tearfully wonderful, but as had been the case post-Kentwell I felt slightly indecent without a really stupid hat.

'You could have been an asshole,' said Butch, compressing my hand in his meaty grasp, 'but you weren't.' Good enough, I thought, exchanging farewell blank gawps with the boys and trying to ruffle Jacob's crispy hair as I climbed into the pick-up cab.

A hundred miles north, Gerry pulled up at a set of automatic glass doors. Before them reared a sign that told how far away 1775 now was, and yet how near: FREE HIGH-SPEED INTERNET ACCESS. GOD BLESS AMERICA. Beyond them a young hotel receptionist readied herself for the grisliest encounter of a short career.

'I guess I'll do this as long as my body lets me,' sighed Gerry, passing my holdall out through the passenger door, 'and then write books as long as my brain does.' And with that, this extraordinary fellow, perhaps the single most impressive human I have yet to encounter, was gone.

An hour and two baths later, I plucked a fat tick from the crook of my knee and gave it a good twenty-first-century seeing-to in the in-room microwave. Then I went downstairs, ate a large part of one of the boys' relatives, and severely impaired my ability to operate machinery.

Chapter Seven

The rain had arrived with a bang the evening before, heralded by great horizontal lightning bolts that pulsed across the sky for full seconds, illuminating the epic forests around. Neither scenery nor conditions seemed consistent with being in Texas, as I had been – alone at the wheel – since driving down the wrong side of the ramp at the car-hire depot in George Bush Intercontinental Airport, 200 jetlagged miles previously. With the road deserted and the few towns along it cast in derelict gloom, the foul and furious storm seemed aimed squarely at me. Godlike retribution for undersealing my Two-Door Economy/Compact with two coats of fresh raccoon, or for the aural company of KHPT 106.9, which for three Toto-heavy hours had besmirched its mission statement by failing to deliver the best of the eighties, and more.

The sense of being singled out for punishment hardened when I peered through drooping eyes and double-speed wipers at a succession of 'no vacancy' signs, an affront to their deserted car parks, and the other mounting evidence that I was now alone in all the world. Even when, in a state of dangerous fatigue, I came to a sudden and oblique halt before a motel with an illuminated reception area, the human behind it could only offer me the room kept in reserve for disabled guests – with the proviso that I faced summary eviction should some unfortunate wheel himself in from the storm-torn darkness in need of ensuite facilities cluttered with white scaffolding.

It was still raining when I yawned off into the trailer-trashed rural vastness the morning after, and a couple of hours later when my Economy/Compact wallowed to a standstill at the appointed muster area in Kisatchie National Forest. By then I'd stopped thinking of it as rain: the subdued monotony of water falling from the windless, off-white heavens seemed more like the product of some dependable industrial process.