Nobody is going to read this but I need to set it down for my own self. There is so much that I must come to terms with.
I am known to have been born in this valley with my parents well known and alive until recently. I can remember my childhood here in detail all the way from my beloved Horhee my stuffed toy horse. Cheeky Horhee who, with my father’s manipulation, would casually sneak up on the sugar bowl, looking ever so innocent, to make that last final dash to gorge as much as he could before being taken, given a shaking, and a stern talking too. A puerile joke that never wore out. Poor chewed, patched, dribble-soaked Horhee. The wrongs I did you. I couldn’t sleep without Horhee.
But then, strong in me is my other childhood, my other young manhood, in what is almost certainly my real life with Mom and Pop who are still alive, or were, and my sister Ruth.
My proper home is in one of the Mid-West’s better areas for soaring with ridge up-draughts that can be relied upon and some very useful thermals over the extensive plowed areas on the plains beyond. When all else fails there is always the thermal above the Wal-Mart car park. What could be more natural than that soaring should become my sport of choice and that I should buy myself a Standard Cirrus to look down on the world from Mount Olympus. I came to know the home state well. If I got too far from the home spread, Ruth would come out with the Chevie and the transport trailer to fetch me home.
I come to my last flight. My last forever I would imagine. How the scene below me changed I do not know. I didn’t notice the change sudden though it must have been. There was still a plain below me but it was a valley plain that couldn’t exist this close to home. I had been up only a matter of minutes. The valley appeared to be about sixty miles long and to be completely ringed in by high vertical bluffs. I am confused at what happened next. One moment, I was at sufficient altitude to see the full extent of the valley and yet, at what seems to be the very next instant, I was finding myself below the level of those bluffs and in urgent need of some lift. I was not to find that lift and had quickly to decide where to put my fragile bird down. There was a dirt road but I was not going to reach it. My forced choice was a flat waste of thigh length grass. A bit chancy. Who was to know what that grass concealed. Nothing as it happened and I was able to put her down with only slight damage. But where was this valley located? I was already convinced that the answer had to be nowhere. More convinced when my normally trustworthy Global Positioning System could give me no indication and an attempt to call Ruth made it clear that there was no cell-phone signal.
I had not opened the canopy. I could not bring myself to open the canopy. Outside was a world, an obviously solid world that could not exist: that occupied the exact same space as the solid world that I knew. Reality was turned on its head. I was unmanned. I could not let this alien world in. The cockpit encapsuled the safe world.
I was lost to everything I loved. Mom and Pop, Ruth, the neighbours. All of them possibly nearby but now physically unreachable. There could be no hope of getting back to them. I had no idea how I’d got here. And if I knew how to make the crossing it was just as likely that there were a multitude of worlds occupying this space rather than just the two. That was what they posit. It would be impossible to get the right one. I cannot describe the anguish one feels at losing everyone and everything one knows.
I sat there under my little plastic cloche and although the day outside appeared overcast, time began to make my fragment of the old world hotter, muggier, and oxygen depleted. I couldn’t stay there forever.
Crothall 2
Even then, I was being worked on. The unseen proprietors of this place were in my head doing whatever it is they do. I felt nothing, suspected nothing, but soon began to feel somewhat familiar with the place which didn’t really make any sense. And yet, I didn’t for a moment question it. At the same time, I had as yet seen no living creature and remained fearful of what they would be like. Then, as if to allay my fears, a Blue Jay winged in to rest on the long-fallen tree off to my right and moments later it was joined by another. There was my answer! The really familiar. If there were any Doctor-Seuss monsters lurking in the long grass, the Jays would know of their presence. I think at this distance that the Jays were deliberately sent to give me that assurance.
I waited by the road for perhaps an hour. Clearly it was a road that didn’t see much traffic. The gnats were definitely the same there as at home. Every bit as persistent. At last, when I was convince that no-one was ever going to come, there was a distant dust cloud that resolved itself into a closed-body Reo Speedwagon and I, who had had never so much as heard of a Reo Speedwagon, recognised it as such at a distance and knew to whom it belonged. Frank and Wendal Berry. Frank and Wendal are butchers, one of the two such firms in the town, and have their shop three doors down from my own. One or the other delivers to outlying areas on Tuesdays and Fridays. This time it was Frank.
As I said, I was already being worked on. I was confused and could see nothing strange in recognising the Reo and knowing Frank, and had also somehow accepted that this was 1928. Why should I think this?
Frank came back to the Cirrus with me. “You’re lucky that I came this way,” he said. “I don’t usually. And I’m not sure what made me come today. It’s not a good road.”
He’d never seen a sailplane before, as might be expected, and walked around it several times in some amazement, hat in hand and scratching his head. The look on his face was almost comical. He had rope on the Reo, a wise precaution on many of the local dirt roads, and we used it to secure the plane parts once it was disassembled. As a precaution, we dragged it over to use the fallen tree as an anchor. “They get quite a bit of wind through here sometimes.”
That seems to be how I got here although this may be just another implanted memory. It is difficult to be really sure of anything. Crothal 3
Frank dropped me off at my shop door and there was my name on the window.
THE RADIO SURGERY
Sales and Repairs
Ralph Fletcher
Proprietor
“How come you didn’t open today,” he asked. And what could I say? That I’d never actually been there before? I knew that this was me even though it couldn’t be. I avoided the subject.
“If I hire one of Greg Morton’s drays tomorrow, the long one perhaps, would you come with me to get the Cirrus?” I could see in his eyes that he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“The sailplane,” I amended. But it was clear that he knew nothing of any sailplane.
It appeared that I had carelessly left the door unlocked, someone had anyway, and that that someone had swept the footpath outside. The keys were on the workbench. There was some valuable stock out on the showroom floor, top-of-the-line Majestics and Gukbransens but in this valley they were unlikely to be taken. Delinquency of any sort is almost entirely unknown. The group programming tends against it.
This clearly was no instant wand-tap business. The lean-to out back held filament accumulators some on charge, some charged. The frugal still held on to their battery sets. On the workshop floor were sets awaiting repair. On the shelves others ready to pick-up, complete with work docket, parts used and price. It appeared to be my rather distinctive handwriting on the dockets. There was a chassis upside down on the bench and I knew the problem that it had come in with and that I’d been having trouble tracking down its cause. Another set I had left running on the signal generator, volume well down, hoping that its intermittent fault would make its appearance. But as always seems to be the case, once on the bench, it had shown no sign of trouble.
In saying ‘I’ I mean that other replaceable Ralph Fletcher most of whose memory I seem to have inherited with the shop. That framed certificate from Coynes in Chicago had now been earned by my efforts. Everything that I know about valve radios, the town, the people, comes from him. So what had happened to him? A continued worry is what did ’they’ do with him, this doppelganger other me, once he had served their purpose? I was to find that he had left me a good reputation, both as to honesty and to skill as a radio serviceman, and a helpful bank balance as well. Crothall D
No outside radio signals can be received in this valley but the print does comes in, both newspapers and magazines, and they whetted our appetite for radio. This led to the setting up of two amateur broadcasting groups in the valley one of which uses the rooms above the shop. The first station was in our rival Gatewell and that made it even more important that we should have our own station here in Crothal. My former self had seen the advantage of having a Crothal signal, helping them to set up, letting them use the upper floor rent free. That the upstairs was meant to be living quarters and the access is internal might seem to be a disadvantage but it has proved otherwise.
Broadcasting hours are 4.30 pm to 10 pm and the programs are entirely amateur. First, a children’s program with various ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts.’ There are always birthday greetings with any littlies present singing, “Arpy arpy ber erf day.”And yes, there’s an Uncle Ralph. That position was definitely not sought. June Openheim, our ‘Aunt June’, came down the stairs one afternoon in a panic.
“Can you sing?..Do you know any poetry?..Any stories?………..Well!…………….Can you do anything at all?….I’ts urgent!” Someone hadn’t turned up.
Maybe I could dredge up some Smokey Dragon. My outside father used to tell Ruth and me Smokey Dragon stories away back. Smokey hatched from an unrecognized dragon’s egg that we had carelessly thrown into our lounge fire. There in the midst of the fire was a baby dragon chewing on one of the glowing coals. Smokey grew, as dragons will, and became big enough to take us on his back in flight. Naturally, we were the heroes of the stories, righting wrongs, performing rescues, and across the way in that storyland lived Mr. and Mrs. Nasty who were constantly complaining about Smokey while hatching nefarious schemes to get him for themselves. Ruth and I outsmarted them every time.
So in my hour of need, I turned to Smokey and he was a hit. I have long since run out of remembered adventures and been forced to make up my own with children in the studio taking the spotlight. Ruth and I used to prompt Dad with, “One day,” thinking that the rest of story must automatically follow once Dad was helped with that start. Now children in the studio are grouped around the microphone to give me that same ‘one day’ help.
I don’t hang around for the rest of the program. The local news, the stock and produce prices at six. Followed by a program of phonograph records borrowed from Holroyd’s Music Shop who are given the appropriate plug in return. The rest of the evening is made up of talks on local and wider issues, singers and musicians of varying ability, occasionally a short play. It is a mark of distinction to be heard on the air. Music teachers are keen to have their pupils perform as illustration of their teaching skills. We also have our share of mothers with infant prodigies. Overall, an entertainment of variable quality with the occasional panic and hasty fill-in and yet better than might be expected. I can only compare it to these women who with next to nothing in the larder and can put a tasty meal on the table.
Our facilities are minimal. Our one studio is the largest room upstairs its walls draped with old curtaining for sound absorption. We have no isolated control booth. Any adjusting of the two microphones and the turntable is done at a panel in the studio itself. The evening’s producer is right there in the studio as are those waiting their turn to perform. Silence has to be the rule except in the children’s programs where the younger children can hardly be expected to keep quiet. The producer must communicate with gestures and hasty notes.
I am finishing a Smokey story when I find Aunt Fay in my face gesturing that she wants me to stretch the story a bit. She holds up two fingers. ‘Can I give her another two minutes of it?’ And I do. It appears that the two girls, piano duetists, who were to be next on the program have gone to the bathroom and locked themselves in. Panic probably. The two minutes give Fay enough time to talk their teacher, silently of course, into playing “The Teddy Bears Picnic’ extempore which she does with variations until they are prized out. A copy of ‘A Child’s Garden of Verse’ has been thrust into my hand, I am announced, and recite from it while they are being organized. Another announcement and the program continues as if nothing has happened. We have become real troopers. It is a matter of pride that we have never had a break in the program. Gatewell with better facilities, they are the bigger town, cannot say that.
Our success belongs to our invisible producers, the women who spend their afternoons putting the program together: cajoling the less than eager: who make its running seamless. Their men, committed to the important role of making a dollar, do not have the time. They are women who could organise universal chaos, manage a buffalo stampede. Maybe our country would be in a better state if they had been running it. But the world is not ready for them.
The children’s programs can be announced by a woman, one of the aunts, that is to be expected, but the later, more serious, parts of the program must be announced by a man. That a woman is feeding him exactly what to say and when to say it, is getting performers to the microphone on cue, is keeping everything to time, doesn’t count. The announcer is the face of the station and that face must be a man.
Since the upstairs was originally the living accommodation of the shop owner, the stairway is internal and access is through the shop. That hardly matters. Not here in Crothall. I just ask them to make sure that they shut everything off and make sure that the front door is properly closed when they go.
Actually, I always know exactly what the night’s program is going to be. There is no phone upstairs and the women arranging the program, and there’s always two of them, spend much of the late afternoon monopolising my shop phone to make sure that everything is still on track: that those who promised will be here. They have to be at the shop because that’s where people know to ring. If one has to go upstairs for something, both go. The same is true if one must go to the bathroom, two must go. Two can be with me but not one alone. They are each other’s moral guardian. Crothall is a small town. People talk. Doubtless these women talk about each other when apart. It’s not that I have a reputation. A married woman alone with a single man is something not done.
There is a pool of eleven women and I have come to know them well simply by being part of the scenery. The home-cooking they bring with them goes with the contents of my coffee pot and the desultory conversation. They sit on the spare stools at my bench and I’m right there. It would not do to make any overt move toward friendship, and certainly not to flirt with them, nor for either side to ever admit friendship. And yet we have become friends.
It’s not just the bluffs that confine us. There is also the ‘done’ and ’not done.’ I have never seen a man here hold his wife’s hand in public. Hardly a scandalous act but it’s just not done.
I am more than friends with one of the women, Jan. June and Jan are an unlikely pair and yet they will work with no-one else and work well together. June is blonde, bird-like in movement, with nicotine stained fingers and a slight stain in the hair above the centre of her forehead. Unfortunately, everyone smokes here. She is one of those small women who even with a smoker’s wrinkles still manage to look as though their skin has shrunk to put their insides under extreme compression. The sinews in her neck stand out so starkly that it worries me just to look at her. But even though I find her unattractive and think that she has only herself to blame, I can’t help feeling for her.
Jan is almost her opposite, a brunette with a short cut that doesn’t really suit. A large woman. About two June’s worth. Not overweight but large framed. Married, of course. And! She’s old enough to be my mother, intelligent but no more so than June. Jan and I have related to each other which is something that we have not needed. Like so much else it’s not allowed and cannot be admitted. Something in each of us has spoken to that something in the other. I’m sure that she has understood it no more than I do. Sort of brother and sister but closer. Closer than I was with Ruth who is my natural sister. I doubt if June has been able to see it and I certainly hope not. The gossip would love it. Crothall E
I took the hired dray out the next day by myself and, as I would soon come to expect, there was no sign of the Cirrus, no indication that it had ever been there. At first, I thought that I must have the wrong area but then there was that distinctive fallen tree. Thigh-length grass when trampled doesn’t recover overnight but this grass had never been trampled. The Night-People could not allow any contamination of their Petrie-dish culture. That was three years ago.
I must explain a little about the Night-People and it can only be a little. I do not know who or what they are or why they are doing what they are doing. I can only think that we, the people in this valley, are some kind of social experiment. I have not seen even one of these night dwellers, nobody has, and yet they are all pervasive. They are our interface with the outside world and, to a large extent, create what is seen here as reality. ‘Night-People’ is my name for them. No-one else seems to even suspect their existence.
Farming in this valley produces far beyond the needs of the local market particularly in dairying and livestock production. Local needs are handled in what to an outsider like me is a normal manner. Milkmen farm their own farms, milk their own cows, deliver with horse and dray, and measure the milk with a pint or quart dipper into the customer’s container. It’s raw milk but none of us seem to be dying from it. We have two such milkmen in Crothal. I believe that there’s at least three in Gatewell. Milk going for manufacture is a different matter. Churns left on the roadside stand are found to be empty and washed in the morning and an appropriate credit has appeared in the farmer’s bank account during the night. Stock penned for external sale disappear in the same way. Again a bank credit results.
The Denver papers show the country to be full of arguments for and against this New Deal of Roosevelt’s. Clearly ’that man’ is not popular in some quarters. The country remains in depression, unemployment stays high, farmers are still walking off the land, and the farmers here believe themselves to be near walking off too. In fact, everybody here believes us to be deeply affected by this slump. But it just isn’t so! Our prices are higher. I can’t think of anybody out of work. We are somehow insulated from it all. Belief is a very strange thing.
But then the whole setup doesn’t make sense and yet it is accepted as exactly how things should be and these are otherwise rational people. A dealer can phone Detroit for new Ford or Hupmobile and several mornings later it will be found in his yard. A newsagent will find bundles of the Denver papers outside his door when he opens for business. Film cans just turn up at the movie house. Underground gas tanks top themselves up. And since there can be no commercial travellers, market shelves restock like a never-empty purse. There are, of course, appropriate bank debits. It might be thought that one could hide and see who does all this but I would be the only one who has ever tried. Never again! They knew that I was watching. I thought myself well concealed but they felled me. How? I don’t know. I woke at first light feeling as if the sky had fallen on me and yet there was not a mark to show. It was my warning. Cratholl F
Being different is stressful. Though it might seem that being unique, special, would give one a bit of a boost, I’m afraid not. Everyone and everything else in this place is soundly asleep by 11.30 pm. They are somehow switched off for a couple of hours, completely out to it, but whatever does it doesn’t work with me. Admittedly, I cannot look into everybody’s bedroom but I think that intruding on one is enough.
When I first came here I was boarding with Tom and Elsa MacMahon and had been, supposedly, for some years prior to this. I am one of those forced to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night. I would always tiptoe past their room being careful to avoid the floorboard that only seemed to creak at night. And I would not flush for fear that I woke them. When I became aware on these excursions that I didn’t hear Tom snoring, I began stopping for a moment outside their bedroom door. There was never any sound which was strange. Even people asleep betray their presence. It was as though there was nobody there.
It was weeks before I could bring myself to ever so carefully open the bedroom door. If Tom woke, I would need to have a very good excuse for my intrusion. Maybe,“I think I heard someone downstairs.” Tom drove for the Town Council, had muscles like Popeye, and didn’t have any need of spinach. A bit fiery Tom. But he didn’t wake. Neither did Elsa. They lay there as if dead and their breathing was not perceptable. I took up the courage to touch Elsa very very gently and she was warm but there was no sign of a response. I gently pushed her arm. Nothing. I pushed reasonably hard. Still nothing. I pushed Tom. Exactly the same. I returned to my room unable to sleep for the revelation. In the morning they were their usual bright selves. I found my own place though it’s more trouble having to do for oneself.
I have difficulty sleeping. If there’s a pig of a chassis on the bench that I can’t figure out, I tend to take it home with me in my head. So I get up, get dressed, and go out for a walk to physically tire myself out. It’s safe enough as long as I’m home in bed with the curtains drawn by midnight. It must be all over by about 3 a.m. because that’s when Harold Danks told me he gets up. Harold’s a baker and a nice chap.
And what a difference between the night here and night in the outside world. Outside, there was always traffic and the continuous hum of distant traffic, people walking, lights everywhere, and businesses open regardless of the hour. You could feel life. Here there is nothing. A complete emptiness. No lights, no dogs, no stray cats yowling, no cricket love calls, no racoons scouting trash cans and being the only thing alive takes quite a bit of getting used to. The banks are part of the mystery too. There are two local banks. The Valley Merchant Bank and the Farmers Union Bank each having a branch in both centres. There is, of course, no such thing as electronic funds transfer. Checks and cash are used for local transactions with daytime business being written up by hand in ledgers. Transactions beyond the valley are also apparently written up by hand but during the night. The question is how could that be? By whose hand? When goods are ordered from outside by phone or mail, the appropriate amount is somehow transferred from the buyer’s account. Credit is available for local trade but not for external transactions. It is strictly bank debit.
I keep in well with my bank manager. Since ‘29 one needs to and it’s interesting to note that while ever so many small banks went to the wall neither of our two banks seem to have suffered although both now cry the need for careful management. I asked how he felt about this after-hours business: his having no control over it. “Everyone has gone home. The ledgers are locked in the vault. All the doors are locked. So how does it happen?” My query was dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders that said ‘stupid question.’ I didn’t tell him that I’d been poleaxed while watching his precious bank. For the greater part of the first two years, I spent weekends and public holidays searching the bluffs for the way out of this prison. I’d take the back seat out of the Chevie tourer and fill it with camping gear and extra gas, prepared to sleep rough. A butterfly net and some capture bottles gave me the excuse to want to enter private land. A boyhood hobby now having its uses. I come from a farming family (perhaps two farming families?) and always made a point of seeking the landowner’s permission first. I was never once refused and families who had known my valley parents and me since I was ‘so high’ would insist on putting me up for the night. There could be no polite way to refuse and it would mean an evening of reminiscences. I have two pasts and they tend to get entangled. And I continue to have some problem at spending the night with those who will shortly be dead even if it is to be only temporarily.
I can say definitely that there is no way out and the bluffs are vertical, smooth, almost polished, and most definitely solid. There is nothing illusory about those bluffs. Which raises questions. The most obvious being, “ How are heavy items spirited in and out?”I think I know how I got here but what about the original people? There were no sailplanes or helicopters then.
Another problem is the electricity supply. We have a Valley Power Company which is bank debited for its bulk supply. We have no generating plant in this valley and I can state it as a definite fact that no power lines enter the valley. So where does the power come from? Since there has never been an outage, no-one has thought to ask that question but me. It is just one small facet of the communal blindness. And there will never be an outage. That is one of the few things that I am sure of.
The same holds true for telephone lines. None come in. There is a manual exchange here in Crothal and another in Gatewell and either exchange can put you through immediately to the other. This service is not considered a toll call. It is when you ask for toll that something strange takes place. Neither town has a toll exchange and yet the operator can put you through to tolls simply by putting your plug into the appropriate socket. A woman’s voice, always the same voice, greets you with, “Tolls here.” Toll calls are necessarily business calls. No-one but myself is aware of having family or acquaintances on the outside. I have asked for my real home number only to be told that no phone number can have that many digits.
Normally, there is no need to give the number. It is enough just to name the company, “Grigsby-Grunow”, “Atwater-Kent”, or “Zenith please” and this seemingly omniscient woman can put you straight through. I ring out occasionally when a part is needed urgently but I don’t believe that the woman I speak to next is the switchboard operator at the relevant companynor or that the man she switches me through to is really in the spare parts department but never-the-less I get my parts.
Several times I have tried to draw these men out—if men they be—to get them to let slip their mask a little. I have asked in a friendly fashion such conversation starters as, “What’s the weather like over your way?” or “Who do you fancy in the world series?” I am probably being too obvious but, just the once, I had some slight success. I got an out of character, “”Why can’t you just be happy like everyone else?” What would happen if one day I answered “Tolls here” with “Would ya get me Zenith, sweetheart?”
I am their failure. Even when apparently alone, I can feel their attention. ( Yes chaps. Like right now. I know that you’re aware of every word as I put it down.) I talk to them. Have a bit of a grizzle. Tell them what it’s like to live with these constant anomalies. I expect no reply but there’s no one else to understand me in this ant farm. Just knowing that there is an ear there somewhere seems to help although I really need answers. Crothall 6
I have learned that knowing of future events, things soon to be discovered, what technology will be able to do in the decades to come is of no help to me. Of electronics, I know only what ’they’ have fed to me. That means A.M. radio, thermionic valves. I was a surveyor. Tell anyone here that there will be radios that go in the pocket, phones without wires, satellites beaming moving pictures earth-wide, and it’s as if the words have never been uttered. They hear but their minds are not allowed to retain the information. While I’m telling them their faces will be saying ‘Yeah! You’ve got a great imagination alright.’ but the memory that I have even spoken dies with the sound of my voice. In effect, I haven’t said anything. And really! Do they need to know these things?