by Mark Helprin
Marshall had read: “The atmosphere is a prism which bends and refines the light of the sun.” Surely this lens, although potent enough to remove entire sunlit towns and set them in the middle of distant rivers, could not alter the solid laws of time.
There was such a lens, in fact, imbedded in the mass of machinery that was the projector of the Victory Theater in Eagle Bay. The Victory was a vaudeville house with a peeling screen, but the manager loved bright lights and had installed a great arc, so that no one noticed this imperfection, and the people of Eagle Bay were periodically raked over in light and color. It was so bright that it was as if they were rocks in its stream. Even blockheaded hoodlums from other towns who came equipped with dozens of firecrackers forgot their arsenals and stared open-mouthed at the screen. For the citizens of Eagle Bay the Victory was sort of a closed religious ritual. They never spoke of it, but the white heat and flashes of color from the powerful arc were like a steam bath or a good workout. On exiting the theater one felt light and clean, clear-headed. Even the blockheads felt clear-headed. Men, women, and children were here cleansed and calmed.
Late one afternoon Marshall escaped a cold March rain by attending the Victory’s 50¢ Saturday matinee, in which the subject was from the Arabian Nights, scenes of wonder and astonishment inside a jeweled cave at the earth’s center. Marshall was sunk in a worn brown seat, grasping a bag of nuts, bolts, and latches he had picked up at the hardware store, when Sinbad whirled about in the cavern and the camera focused, as if from his eyes, on the multicolored walls glowing and flashing. The strong light shining in deep ultraviolet and purples, the glinting of the emerald, a green washing out of the eyes, took hold of Marshall in a way he had always felt to be at the brink of his life, but had never experienced.
His chair seemed to be revolving. Although he was upside down, the screen still met his gaze in exactly the same place, as it too circled in space. His eyes were fixed, paralyzed, held open, and his body followed suit, becoming stiff, exerting unnatural strength to remain frozen to the point. He had no idea what force was holding him, why he was frozen, why his muscles were as hard as iron or wood, why he felt so much pain. But the swirling colors were coming steadily and truly, with a sadness and expanse so magnificent that he could not hold, and there was a great white flash, after which was peace.
When he awoke, the theater was nearly empty, with the last of the children going out into the rain, and the usher plodding slowly up the dirty carpet. Marshall’s hands were bloody, for he had grasped the bag of hardware with extraordinary force. The muscles in his neck were stiff and his body was shaking as he got up, exhausted, to walk to the door. There he stood looking at a wet brick wall in an alley and vines laden with heavy drops. The usher walked up the line, shutting the doors. When he got to Marshall he said, “Go home now,” and Marshall stepped into the rain with the door closing behind him. The cool rain did him some good, but he was perplexed and angry at whatever had reached out and held him so strongly. He walked over the aqueduct, over the hills, and finally through the woods to his home, where he slept that night as the rain smashed against the roof tiles. He realized that like the enormous pieces of ice which glided down the river, he too was carried on a current, which would lead him from the things he loved.
Taking the warship as a sign, he assumed that he would go out by sea, since the Hudson was one of its familiar roads. He slept, not knowing that he was instead soon to chase down the mirage and find in it that which was forever beautiful and good.
III. COLUMBINE
1
THE LAST place Marshall would ever have imagined himself was in a train at two o’clock in the morning clipping past monstrous steel and rubber mills in Gary, Indiana, but he was there and wide awake. Through the window he saw cataclysmic platforms decked in white jewels and smoke, and the whoop whistles of donkey engines could be heard even over the train. For Marshall, night had meant crickets and the moon, and he was truly stunned to realize that amidst the deep-throated blasts and choking sulfurous air men worked in bright light as if it were day, that amidst their engines and furnaces and towers spread across oily landscapes they were like the laborers below the earth in The Time Machine, ignorant of the light, devilish, obsessed. But it was great nonetheless, this brutal beating heart of a steel-limbed nation, so different from his quiet river-bay country.
It was so late at night that the children were almost dreaming. They pressed against the train windows, some of which were open and let in a hot damp wind that had passed through the skeletal towers and picked up sharp disgusting smells. Many of the children were away from home for the first time, as was Marshall, trying hard to be unafraid and to let strange things pass in front of a cold objective eye. But that was hardly the case, for most of them had not been to Chicago, and could not imagine their destination—a camp in the Rockies. Marshall had never been up so late, or surrounded by so many strangers and girls. He reacted by staring at the night scenery with forced determination. It was all hard and noisy, hot and rough, and yet overshadowing the shock and wonder was the best and most exciting feeling he had ever had, or so he thought.
Sitting opposite him was a little girl named Lydia. She had tressed auburn hair and green eyes, and she was from the South. When she had boarded a train full of strangers at Union Station in Washington, she had been touchingly awkward and shy. By pure coincidence, she took the seat across from Marshall. They were young enough for the fact of traveling to Chicago with one another at two in the morning to be in itself a great adventure. The train rushed over steel bridges and oily streams, past structures angular and fierce. Nothing was soft, nothing was slow there, but Marshall was swaying rather gently in his tiredness, content because this beautiful girl had flowers on her dress, and even though he was used to the real things of nature these representations sufficed and were in themselves as enticing or more so than if they had been real. The steel mills eventually passed by unnoticed.
They reached Chicago in the middle of the night and were taken to tiny rooms in the Y. In the morning they assembled for breakfast in the cafeteria, where for 15# they got eggs, sausages, and potatoes. That day they walked about the city—a collection of sandstone planes and flower beds which reminded them just a little of New York. But it was hotter, flatter, quieter, somehow jazzier. You could feel through the walls that in the offices they were dealing in eggs and wheat, sheafs and bales, barrels and butchered beef. It was as if silos and bins had gone wild and migrated to the lake shore from all over the Midwest, agglomerating into tall buildings and independent spires. Surrounded by wholesomeness and good stored grains, Marshall felt as if he were on a farm. Then they would pass a nightclub blaring jazz music in the middle of the day, and even the music seemed as if it had been harvested from the hot fields.
At the science museum they saw chicks being hatched, and a man with a hearing aid and a bamboo cane screamed at them a quite hysterical and desperate explanation of why the earth goes around the sun. Though the boys stuck together climbing fences and jumping hedges, and the girls had their concerns, Marshall kept glancing at Lydia, who, to his surprise and delight, glanced back. In the afternoon they rested by the lake, and after dinner they left the singing flat city on another train, bound for Columbine, Colorado, near the Wyoming border. There, a childrens camp awaited them where the Elk River ran at the foot of the Sierra Madre. The places had names like Sweetwater County, Wind River Range, Mill Run Ridge, North Platte Fork, Encampment, Boulder, Larimer County, Piermont, and Fort Collins. Somehow, even before they arrived, the children associated these places and the windswept mountains which they had never seen, with the teaching of love and honesty. Even at their age they knew that such things had to be learned, and were grateful for an academy in the high air. Anyway, Chicago was so hot that even children were glad to leave it. The train began its long climb.
After passing over astounding inland seas of grain and wildflowers, after winding around foothills and valleys, crossing rivers as clean a
nd fresh as the day they were born, and rising to air so clear and light that it dizzied the already tired children, they detrained at White Horse Junction, Colorado, a railhead at 10,000 feet primarily for the mines. It was evening, and there was great confusion as a hundred children, their trunks and duffels, and their books and small bags, were transferred from the train to a fleet of farm trucks with high boarded sides. Men in denim and khaki, tanned as bronze as Roman coins, loaded their impressed pickups, lifting little girls bodily into the back of the trucks, giving the little boys a brace on the behind if they started to fall backward as they clambered over the tailgates. The engine breathed heavily after pulling its cars up the mountain. It was one of the last regular-service steam locomotives—fourteen feet high, weighing almost half a million pounds, fired by coal. Muscular stokers with bandannas around their heads observed the children. Darkness enveloped them as a mountain cast a cool shadow in the sunset; beyond, the peaks shone like burnished metals, and the few snow-covered heights were gold in sympathy. The stokers got to work, and after a complicated release of levers and turning of valves, the engine backed off down the track to a water tower, leaving the children in the center of a white steam cloud, like immigrants at Ellis Island in the fog. After a head count, the trucks moved off in a windy evening convoy traversing forest and mountain roads, rushing through the little town of Columbine like an armored column, taking a dirt road encased by cathedral walls of pine, crossing wood bridges at speed, racing to the outer meadows of the camp. Led by recidivists, they sang a song:
Sail along, the open road
Under skys, so clear
Sail along, the open road
To Columbine, each year.
Despite the juvenile lyrics and the roar of trucks and wind, it sounded very beautiful as the choir of young voices sang to dissuade fears and to celebrate arrival in the wilderness once again for the beginning of a mountain summer.
They came upon a grassy common surrounded by a half-circle of wooden buildings, each with a large porch on which was a line of rocking chairs. In the rest periods and times before meals the children rocked on the veranda, gazing at a view so wide, long, and magnificent that it was, as someone said, “a peacemaker.” They could see across valleys and plains, and down a white-tipped range to an infinity of alpine meadows. A herd of sheep ten miles distant looked like a tiny white glove resting on a mountainside; a town with radiating roads and track was a starfish stuck in the valley. Great white clouds erupting in blinding billows sailed the range as a matter of course, not above them, but out from the mountain and level with their vision. The sun was pure and gentle, the mountain colors calm. Time fell away.
In the confusion of debarking—from the trucks a score or more of bright beams crisscrossing the dark field, diesel and gasoline engines clicking and purring, shouts and laughter—Marshall stepped a few paces into a field of dry grasses to look at space and the stars, which ran in belts and lines across the suede sky as he had never seen; they began to take hold of him, but he turned away hard and walked back to the trucks grouped like a herd of bulls with shining headlamps.
Once inside a huge, varnished, beamed hall of yellow pine, they sat at tables for eight, under clear bulbs in conical tin shades. They sang a grace which did not rhyme and caused Marshall to cock his head and look quizzical—“God is great and God is good, and we thank Him for this food”—and then delegates from the tables brought back enormous platters of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and carrots, buckets of gravy, plates of hot biscuits, and a tray of little jars containing honey, jelly, and butter. Thin air, exercise, and the natural growth of the children necessitated such menus at every sitting, and the counselors claimed that they could see their charges getting taller by the hour. This was much discussed at the first meal, and excited Marshall, for even though he was lean and rugged, stronger than two boys his age and as agile as an ocelot, he was small and feared that he would grow up (or not grow up) to be a midget.
On the long journey from New York they had crossed the Mississippi, which seemed to Marshall like a national date line, and he had lost track of the days. It was therefore quite a shock when at dessert the lights dimmed, the hall of kindly strangers began to sing, a cake with ten bright candles was trooped out by cooks in puffy helmets, and Marshall was cheered as if he were a hero. Embarrassed and moved in a way which befitted his age, he realized that it was the twenty-eighth of June, his birthday. He was told to pick someone out of the crowd to help him extinguish the candles. In the warm light shining on a ring of faces one stood out, the face of a seductively beautiful girl who was already breathing hard because she knew that she was going to be chosen. Marshall said nothing, but he had not looked at anyone else. She walked to his side and looked in his eyes. There were giggles from the crowd and the counselors’ deep voices said something they neither heard nor wanted to hear. The children said, “Hold hands, hold hands.” They did; they blew out the candles; and the lights went on.
That night in his bunk Marshall felt as if all the mountains and the height of the sky were in him, as if the world were a place in which entire alpine regions conspired to make children happy. And that night in Colorado the moon came up so bright that even sheep and horses could not sleep, and stood in the fields staring upward as confused as the first astronomers.
2
THE SECOND triumph was better. At the stables, two dozen children his age were assembled on benches overlooking a riding ring. The instructress was an octogenarian named Madame Zaragoza, whose Austrian dialect was so heavy it was a wonder that the horses could carry it and her at the same time, though she was so frail that she had to grasp the wooden rails whenever the wind picked up. At eighty she cared little for appearances and her daily outfit consisted of high black boots, jodhpurs, a pink satin shirt embroidered with Spanish proverbs, a sport fisherman’s vest in which rode a multiplicity of tonics and pills, a police whistle at the end of braided snakeskins, and an army hat pressed down on what seemed to be a clowns wig. She often forgot what she was doing and leaned against the backside of a horse, fixedly staring at the nearest peak, which was called Mt. Cube. Most of the children had never seen anyone so old. When she became suddenly still they assumed that she had died, and knots began to form in their throats until a brave one managed to chirp, “Madame Zaragoza ... Madame Zaragoza!” and she came back to life to continue where she had left off. Once, she had come across the shoe prints of several horses, some going north and some south. Because they had obviously passed at different times, their tracks were overlaid. Madame Zaragoza, however, concluded that phantom horses capable of passing through one another were riding her range, and she made Marshall and a bunch of other unfortunates erase the evidence and pledge secrecy.
She was explaining the parts of the horse and its tack, things which were to Marshall second nature. And yet he was so nervous that he could hardly sit still. Lydia was with the girls, and he wanted badly to show her how well he could ride. Madame Zaragoza adjusted the stirrups to what Marshall could see was suitable for him, and then asked for a volunteer to take the horse around the ring. In one motion, Marshall raised his hand, stood up, said, “Me,” and jumped from the rail onto the horse’s back. At last he felt at home, and for a moment he forgot even Lydia, for the movement and grace of the horse became all-embracing. He felt again as if he were twirling in head-over-heels flight through starlit space. He set out at a canter, gliding around the ring like cavalry. Then he galloped, and while so doing jumped on and off the horse from side to side, springing up and over. He veered to the center, and in slow motion the horse stretched his muscles in a graceful arc toward the sun, and Lydia saw horse and rider frozen in the air above the barrier—having abandoned everything for the laws of flight. Madame Zaragoza was stunned. From that moment she let him do anything he wanted, and trusted him with tasks such as running to fetch trail goggles from her little cabin, in which Marshall saw to his amazement about four hundred empty gin bottles lined up on the beams and horiz
ontal members, stacked in corners, under the bed, etc., etc.
He fell as fast as he had risen. On the first Sunday they dressed in white shorts and shirts. Counselors inspected their fingernails and ears. Then they got on the trucks and traveled with blinding speed to Columbine. Marshall asked where they were going and was told, “To a clambake.” This made him happy, since lobster was his favorite food. They pulled up in a row at the church, a beautiful white Alpine building in the middle of a meadow which came right up to the town. When they started to file in, Marshall asked a counselor if the clambake were to be inside or out. “Where’s the food?” he asked.
“Are you crazy?” replied the counselor. “There’s no seafood up here. Were going to church.” By the time Marshall knew what was happening he was inside the doors, and from the starkly Protestant and mountainly interior gleamed the rays of a silver cross. Marshall began to back up against the stream of incoming people.
“I can’t be in here,” he said. “This isn’t the right place for me. I can’t be in here. Let me out.” The counselor told him to shut up and sit down. He did, but when the minister came in he tried to get up and go out. A strong pair of hands grappled with him and pushed him down by the shoulders. It hurt to be shoved into the hard wood. So despite the fact that the minister looked like Eisenhower (for whom Marshall had always felt very sorry) and despite the pleasant-looking ladies and the gentle old men, despite the choir which had started to sing, the sunlight which came through the stained glass windows, the position he occupied in the middle of the congregation, the libertarian behind him, and the enchanting beauty of it all, Marshall submerged into a sea of legs and shoes and got to the aisle, which he ran up faster than a burned jackrabbit. There was a great stir. Eisenhower was (as usual) puzzled, and the Hound of God made his way with great embarrassment through an entire packed row.