Good Mourning, Amerika!

by

Jansen Estrup

When polled most conservative Americans ascribe the ‘good old days’ and ‘taking our country back’ to a quasi-mythic time in the ‘50s, the Nineteen Fifties, when everyone knew where they fit in society and where they would likely end their days. Minorities 'knew where they belonged' and stayed there for the most part. So did the vast white underclass, quietly acquiescing to the draft, assembly line and traditional pastimes. Especially women and children played their roles in the kitchens and classrooms of what Madison Avenue called Middle America.

They were early days of mass marketing, of Leave It to Beaver and little pink housing developments where the Greatest Generation did not have to see the ruin it had made of Germany and Japan, or the groundwork our World Bank was laying for future ruin in the rest of the world. Those were escapes from our dark side, our fear of the nukes we had dropped and now dreaded would be visited upon us for our misdeeds. We studied hard, worked harder, and drugged ourselves with alcohol to drown that knowledge.

What terrors we did acknowledge were ‘out there’ - the godless Asiatic horde, the starving yellow peril, and soon enough, an alien beep-beep-beep from beyond our world, all painted Red.

As a child I knew little of it. Although ten or so, we had no air raid drills. There were science deniers even then, I suppose, and those who believed that a divine dome shielded an America which had done no wrong and never would. We had no television and sometimes could not afford batteries for our war-surplus radio, a fancy headquarters model with many bands, switches, dials and modulators. My mother read to us often, classics mostly. Some of the most memorable came out of Greek and Roman mythology, a counter weight to the bible studies forced on us in grade school and on Sunday from men who wished we were back in the Eighteen Fifties.

What I wish to mourn today is a swamp.

It was not a major site, perhaps only ten or twelve acres all together. It roughly divided the two high ground places on our property, the place my parents bought as World War II came to an end. We called it Fenwood Farm. The ‘front forty’ was where they built our house and barn, where a five year old boy, his siblings Pete and Suzi, four and two, could get lost in the natural world while so many unnatural ambitions roiled around them.

The swamp was a dark, mysterious place with many imagined and real dangers. Low growing myrtle and cabbage palm grew amidst the taller trees, Spanish moss cloaked oaks and pines stood on drier ground. Hummocks of willow and mosses crouched here and there. Swamps have snakes, of course, and they were around. The Cottonmouth, prodigious rattlers (which I could never see in the shadowy mat of leaves and if they did not buzz us, we probably stepped near them a hundred times) and an assortment of harmless species slithered in the muck, grasses and trees blown pickup stick akimbo by storms. One frightened me more than all the others even though it was usually harmless. Called the Indigo, it was so blue it was black and six or more feet long. Once I came upon a rotting log and stepped up on it. At my feet was a huge knot of these monsters in a mating ball. For years I had nightmares of falling into such a nest and later, when I was grown, I heard of a boy who actually did. He died from more than two hundred ‘non-poisonous’ bites and, I imagine, terror.

Turtles like the snapper (we called them alligator turtles) could be treacherous, too, with their great armored heads, hooked beaks and long scaled tails. I worried about them and sharp-toothed garfish when I went wading barefoot. To protect my toes I slid my feet in the slimy sediments and turned up cloudy dregs. In these one could conjure diabolical creatures. But sometimes aliens really were there, as when storms in the Gulf caused a brackish backwater, blue crabs invaded our swamp. More than once I felt the clamp of a claw and more often than that I mistook a sharp stick or squirming mudpuppy for one. On one occasion we caught enough of them to have for dinner.

Once a friend came out to visit. He was the catcher on our Little League baseball team and a city kid. In the swamp he disappeared for a few minutes and we worried briefly, but he showed up after 'nature's call' and we rode our horses awhile. That night he nearly died, his mother charged, having wiped himself with poison ivy leaves and he missed most of the baseball season, laid up, spread eagle in bed.

We who played there were not immune, either. The swamp was a breeding ground many kinds of bacteria, most notably the one which caused a skin disease called impetigo. Unsightly and highly contagious, it was not so much painful as itchy, puss-filled and easily spread. The only treatment was painful, though. Surely it didn't have to burn to long and hard! The first time I was able to swallow my screams I knew I was growing up, to be the 'man' my father had ordered me to be since my fourth birthday. But probably it was the bright purple color of this Tincture of Violet which mattered most, a warning to everyone that a leper was among them! We were often so colorful, my brother, sister and I, like songbirds.

Birds. O, the birds! Egrets and Grey Heron, Curlew, Meadowlark, clouds of starlings visited us. Ducks, Mud hen, too. There were owls and whipper wills at night, daytime hawks and too often, Turkey Vultures … and, of course, Florida's symbol, the Mockingbird.

Wildcats, racoons, rabbits, flying squirrels and rat-tailed opossums were common enough, but the panther was already just a legend by 1950. O, sure, there were insects, too. Bird and bat food. Mosquitos (I was usually in right field under the Little League lights when the DDT fogger came round) and gnats, bees and yellow jackets, butterflies and their stages, flies and their young – 'screwworms' which ate the dead flesh on our cattle and hogs, a great help until we could round them up and doctor them with tarry black salves. There were chiggers in the grass and Spanish moss, tiny fishes and leaches in the murk. Large spiders built nets across open areas strong enough to catch large moths or drenching of dew on the unwary. The swamp had everything it needed.

And there was an alligator, too. One of the first things my father had planned was to deepen the shallow pond on the northern edge of the place. He hired a huge digging machine outfitted with massive jaws and a gnash of cables and gears to dig a long, wide hole in the limestone bottom. The gushing residue was piled up on the western bank. No more than six feet high, we called it ‘the mountain’ and behind it we could sneak out of the woods, up its sides and surprise the young alligator which had adopted the pond as his home and often lay out in the sun on the far bank. Sometimes we threw rocks at him before we actually looked at them. Odd, smooth and regular, they resembled bone and some of them could be fitted perfectly together. Fossils, our teacher called them, and we learned that limestone perfectly preserved the skeletons of huge, extinct animals.

Once, after a disappointing Christmas, I committed one of my more infamous childhood deeds. I got books and clothes for presents. My younger brother, not-so-subtly anointed my father’s heir, at least in the hunting, adventuring, masculine sense, received a Red Ryder BB gun. More curious than jealous (I’d like to think) I swiped it early one morning (make that stole it) and made my way through the cow trails, trees and mist to the back of the mountain. Quietly I approached and then like a marine storming Mt. Suribachi, I raced to the top of the limestone hill and fired at the unsuspecting reptile which lay some 20 yards away across the deepest part of the pond.

The pellet may have found its mark. Surely it would have done no damage if it had. I had no intention of hurting the creature anyway. But instead of the expected ffftppp of compressed air the rifle made a funny clunk sound and the whole inner barrel arced out over the water, paused to greet gravity, then dove out of sight forever into the murky water. Perhaps one day some future archeologist will find a fossilized cylinder of rusty limestone and ponder its meaning.

I never did live that down.

When I speak of murky water, I mean water so full of detritus that one can see only tiny bits of rotting matter, wood and animal waste only partially dissolved in milky fluid which, especially in the shallows must have resembled that primal ooze of early life. The Myakka River, where dozens of us learned to swim one Summer, was only slightly clearer, but only a few of us caught eye diseases.

But the most glorious memory of the swamp and surrounding fields was the several times I beheld a Springtime event. Deep grey storm clouds covered the horizon and much of the overhead. That almost black sky was the perfect backdrop for the new chartreuse blossums of swamp ash and willow trees blazing in a fierce sunshine while all around me lashed a driving rain. Drenched in fool's wonder, I simply stood there.

Recently I've heard that the Tampa Bay area is visited by lightning storms more often than anywhere else in the world, even so infamous as to have a professional sports team named Lightning. Surely that must have been true back in the late Forties, too. But that isn't part of the memory. I don't even recall adults warning children about such events. Everyone seemed much more worried about Russians and godlessness. There was even talk of changing our money and the Pledge of Allegiance to placate the deity.

I'm not so sure why we left. Sold the place, I guess. Or forced to sell. We'd been there more than ten years, but all of a sudden, in my junior year of high school, we moved to Ft. Myers. Uneventful, except that my younger brother ran away from home twice and dropped out of school, I remember only that I worked nights at a movie theater and owned a bicycle which I rode to and from work. It didn't have a headlight so night driving was always an adventure, one quite different from those I had in the swamp. Mostly strange unlit streets and cars whose drivers could not see me. I bought my first pack of cignarettes and 45 rpm record, the Platters' Great Pretender.

Just as suddenly, we returned to Bradenton where we planned to live in town, a property with a large house along the Tamiami Trail. I went back to the same school, where I'd been on the honor role. Before it was over, I had failed and had to take Summer School classes in Spanish and English to pass.

My parents converted our new garage into a Beauty Parlor with apartments over it and we lived across the street while a three story home was being remodeled as apartments for college students.

When we drove out to the farm for furniture and belongings, I was devastated. Someone had dug six-foot deep trenches from the front forty to the back and all the way to the river. Mosquito Control, they said. They cut ditches so deep and wide that our cattle could not cross. Three of them lay in a vulture swarmed pile at the bottom of one trail, with broken necks and legs. Others wandered isolated from grazing and fresh water, ribs showing. I followed the long trench system into the swamp and could not understand what had happened. Hardly a tree still stood. The wide pond where we children had played navy in tin canoes was bone dry and a monster dragline stood on its bank like a War of the Worlds science fiction robot. But it was dwarfed by the high-tension power lines and gigantic supporting structures which marched across the swamp in a perfectly aligned north-south line, eventually to be intersected by Insterstate 75 where it crosses the Manatee.

I've had many traumatic experiences over seventy-five years, and repressed most of them. Like every survivor, it has been my life's mission to uncover them, to absorb their impact, unlearn the lessons I was taught and, if not overcome then at least accept them ... heal if I can. As with so many 'get over it and move on' teachings, I did not realize the impact the destruction of my 'playground' had caused, not until a few days ago. I had always been different, as most teens are … awkward, groping, alone, unsure of my place and standing with friends, teachers, adults – the future. But this swamp had been my father's dream, my family's foundation built upon a lifetime of hard work, mud and ooze. It was the place we'd come to be safe from the war, and its aftermath, the bomb. And now it had been as devastated as any no-man's-land I'd seen in films, not by war but by something called progress.

As I grew up I did not even recognize this event as trauma. Instead I grasped notions of future cities, the cover art of space operas and Mechanics Illustrated, city spires yearning for space, flying cars and kitchen wonders. I tried to fill the void with children's fantasy makers like Disney, Asimov and Ayn Rand, became a Republican, an anti-communist zellot, a cold-warrior. With their lies, it did not seem immoral to bombard centuries-old rice paddies with white phosphorus, children with napalm and forests with agent orange. Better than the bomb, wasn't it? Progress would save us, from the communists, those who would enslave us, from ourselves. Wouldn't it?

But no. Of course not. And so I left the 'profits at any cost' Reagan Republicans and became an independent progressive, wishing progress toward a better, more equal and loving society.

But that is a fantasy, too, isn't it?

Aren't they all just diverse manifestations of that swamp snail I'd see from time to time, living radulae taking their turn with me and you. And lest this sound too ego-centric, I take note of the larger version, too, that monster boring tunnels beneath us, honey-combing the Earth's crust like termites or ants, colonizing it miles deep, extracting, sucking, draining, burning … and then discarding so much of it in land fills, rivers and oceans, waste water containments and radio-active mountains.

Seventy years later I can Goggle map my old swamp from space and note that a hugh building and parking lot occupies the property where my brother shot flushed quail out of the air with .22 short rounds, seldom missing. To the west, across the road from our deep clover pasture, there used to be a 600 acre dairy. Now it has been carved into long fingers of waterfront property, each home with its own boat dock and access to the Braden River. East, where a thousand acres was devoted to rangy cattle, is a reservoir and park. North, all the way to the Manatee, seems open and dry, strangely shunned, like we Yankee children, with our sores painted like lepers or wild Indians, and other, ill-defined strangeness. The power lines are quite visible but there is no sign of a swamp, our house, our dreams or our lives.

And so I mourn that place, that time, those children. And I hope we are all able to recall some of those good and natural things when we demand to take our country back.