RUDIMENTS, pt. 158
Making Cars
I was never able to understand
how man's workmanship was
able to change things and just
let it be left like that. I would
look out over a piece of land,
even the parcels down the end
of my (new) street, and think
of what I portrayed as 'ancient
locals,' - which of course weren't
that at all - and the way they must
have walked along and lived on
these lands. It was all imaginary,
I suppose. Yet, what did become
our 'roads' like Rt. One and St. George
Ave, (Rts. 35 and 27), were old
traverse paths and trails of Indians.
And down the bottom of what was
called 'Chain 'O Hills Road' and
'Merrill Park' was historically the
spot at the waterway and large gully
where an important set of Indian
paths once converged, but it was
all unrecognizable if you went at it
point by point. At the park waterway,
yes the old red-slated rocks made
cliffs, and the water teemed, and
the roads that the white man made
were all named by their location
- East Cliff Road, West Cliff,
South Cliff, etc. By that sense, it
must all have once been as clear
to the newcomers as the nose on
their faces what they were destroying.
I could see it all but it was more by
sense, or by spirit. What I could never
get over was how we'd - meaning
settlers and 'we' white people interlopers
- managed to just cavalierly destroy
everything ever once good. The
waterways to begin with. There were
sections of water in my area that
were good for nothing - black slime,
fetid, tires and lumber. The water
looked dead and sick. It hardly flowed,
and there were pipes and conduits
everywhere for it to flow through
when it did. There were a few auto
junkyards in a row, from which oils
and waters, mixing, flowed like a
thin grease, right into streams. Piles
of cars, metal and glass everywhere.
Horrid. How we'd ever gotten to
that point, I couldn't understand
- factories and jobs, runoff and
junk, all for what? So people like
everyone's Dad could have some
scummy job by which to just
continue and advance the whole
mess. As kids, what were we supposed
to do when everything that worsened
this was considered good and progress
and better? No one ever piped up
about a thing. Mothers and fathers
of the world, unite!
-
One thing I ascertained over
time was that wherever one
'started out' or began, that
became that person's own
number-one-point, the place
from which they begin all their
references, and anything behind
them can be ignored as 'historically'
unimportant or hard to grasp.
Which is why, for example, we
have such a difficult time
understanding the 1920's, 1930's.
Just reading Gatsby is a chore.
I should say 'we' meaning my
generation anyway, which still
makes those references. The new
people, for them I guess looking
back to 1985 is about the same
thing. So, as a child, when I'd see
old Mr. Withers in his '51 Chevy
tooling down the street to get to
Route One, all he ever knows and
knew, then - are roads and byways
and the accessibility of cars and
paving. The world before that to
him was myth. His father's stories
may have been to to him, yes,
about crank-starts and small-town
dusty roads and all, but old Withers
himself now only knows this. The
'the' of his life. And it's a sliding
scale for everyone. I wanted back,
I wanted out and somehow quickly.
But I never got it and all it ever did
was complicate everything for me.
I ended up in the absolute most
diametrically-opposed place to
all that that there could have been
(NYC, 1960's) but at least there
I was able to find and commune
with certain varieties of the
ghostly past that still lived on.
People buildings, waterways,
habits and forms. It suited me
fine. Scary, but fine.
-
In NYC I got to meet a few
Indians too - real tribal
people who surprised the
Hell out of me when I first
met them and realized what
they were. I'd never given
any thought to their being a
real carryover from those old
peoples and days. But here
and there were lingering patches,
groups of Native Americans -
they'd held out and professed
old ways. I'd read of old patches
of people in what later became
Central Park - an entire Negro
Village by the w70's that had
gotten wiped away, church and
all, patches of Irish squatter
encampments too. And, yes,
there were evidences of Indian
tribal people deep within the
wooded area of what became
the park who'd been displaced
too. But no one ever really said
what happened to them, where
they'd ended up, and how it all
went down. I never really found
out. They mostly all lived - those
I'd meet - in squalor along the
lower east side, with all the other
squalor of immigrants, lost people,
those who didn't know the
language, etc - all those who'd
just gotten stalled somewhere in
about the 1940's and just stayed
that way. It was weird. Like being
George Jetson and going to visit
Fred Flinstone. It wasn't as if they
lit fires with flint, or cooked over
open flames and such. That's not
what I mean. It was more that,
without complaining, they
somehow had taken in the
low-position given to them,
and lived with it and moved along
in that manner. One didn't
necessarily HAVE to modernize.
The world still allowed for old
patches and places, the distinguished
tipple of another way of being.
That was extremely hard to grasp
in the middle of a huge steel island
of concrete and glass, of people
scrambling over each other to
death, stressing out to gain an inch
of whatever they thought important.
So different. No wonder the air and
the waters were screwed up. I never
did get to ask any one of those natives
what they thought of what we'd made
of everything - NYC and all - but to
be truthful, they never seemed phased,
bothered, or concerned about any part
of it. They just went about their ways.
I guessed they just had their own
numbers and their own understandings.
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