One Railing Off

It rained most of the weekend, and when we came out onto the overlook the valley was giving itself up to mist. The trees below were half-erased, the far ridge gone soft and white, the whole place breathing through wet leaves and old stone. I set Arthur against the railing and knew right away it was the wrong one.

Black metal now. A yellow CAUTION WATCH STEP sign bolted nearby. Zinnias planted at its feet, bright and municipal and a little too cheerful for what I had come there to do. In the photograph I carry, the railing is red-brown wood.

We’d almost skipped it. We were near the end of the tour, headed back indoors, damp and tired, and Arthur was long done being photographed. He had folded himself into that strange little pose he makes when we have asked one too many times, six years old, patient only because he loves us, clutching his space-alien water bottle as if it were some protective charm. I took the picture anyway. Quick. Crooked, probably. A few yards off from the true spot, which I could not find.

You come back to a place like this believing the past will have left a marker. You think there will be a seam in the air, a little click underfoot, some private architecture of recognition. You imagine yourself standing exactly where you once stood.

And then you find yourself one railing off.

The photograph I mean is one my mother took in the summer of 1984. It was one of the few I scanned for my father’s funeral, so it surfaces often now. It comes up on screens when I am not braced for it, and I never mind. There are some images grief does not exhaust. It only makes them more luminous.

My father is at the center. Thirty-four that summer, which makes him younger in that picture than I am now, standing at the new railing with my own son. He is wearing a faded red pocket tee, full dark beard, tinted aviator glasses, one arm resting easily behind his children. He looks unguarded. That is what stops me most. Not heroic, not posed, not performing fatherhood for the camera. Just there. Happy to be exactly where he was.

It is the best version of him I can remember. The glory years, maybe, though you never know you are living inside anyone’s glory years while they are happening. He liked being on vacation with his family, and you can see it. He is not bracing against money, work, illness, disappointment, or all the later weather of a life. He is simply standing at the edge of a valley with his wife behind the camera and his kids tucked against him, and for that shutter-click of time, nothing is asking anything more of him.

I am nine, blond, in a Superman shirt, one arm hooked over the wooden railing as if I own the place. Nine was my favorite age. Still all imagination, still mostly innocent, but old enough to ride my bike away from home for a whole day. The last summer that was both. My sister is tucked shy against Dad’s side in pink pants, clutching her jacket, uncertain about the drop.

Behind us, fog.

It is an old snapshot, so I cannot swear the haze is weather and not just what the film could hold. Cheap film has its own climate. It makes weather out of chemistry and distance. But the picture remembers it as mist: treetops barely keeping the edge of the valley, the overlook dissolving into white. This past weekend the mist was real. It had rained for days. The fog held up both ends of the forty-two years, honestly.

My mother is not in the frame because my mother is the frame.

She took the picture. She was also the one who made trips happen at all — the planner, the packer, the keeper of maps and snacks and motel reservations, the one who could throw together a drive to Maine on almost no notice because some weather inside her said go. She authored the going, and she did the keeping. Both ends of the family’s remembered life ran through her hands.

Inside, the house was too much, and I loved that it was too much.

The first machine on the tour — a whole ensemble of instruments in a dim room, playing themselves, nobody’s hands on anything — was grinding out a winding, hypnotic line that sounded like nothing from church or the radio. It was mechanical and haunted and somehow grander than music performed by people. I did not know the piece was Boléro. I did not know there was a Ravel. I did not know anything yet; that was the condition of me. But I carried the sound for forty years.

Later, other things kept striking the same nerve. “Kashmir.” The soundtrack of a video game called ActRaiser that I wore out in high school. Big, climbing, ceremonial music. Music with stone stairs in it. Music that seemed to be summoning something from underground. And I told myself they sounded like the machine.

This weekend I found the machine again and stood in front of it while it played, and it was not the song I remembered. Hold that thought.

Deeper in were Alex Jordan’s own rooms, built down into the rock. Low ceilings, stone, the long Prairie lines, the Japanese gardens outside the glass. Everything hidden and horizontal and secretive, as if the house had not been built so much as discovered inside the hill. I was nine and already trying out the word architect like a coat I meant to grow into. I wanted a house like that one — dug into rock like a fort, Eastern and Prairie at once, rooms you could get lost in, windows looking out as if the earth itself had opened one eye. And I believed, in the plain way a child believes, that I would build it someday.

The believing lasted years. I drew those houses over and over: long rooflines, hidden rooms, stone passages, stairs leading somewhere they maybe should not. I loved his schematic sketches most of all, the proof that a person had thought this up before it existed. That may have been the real enchantment. Not the collections, not the strangeness, not even the dark little rooms. The drawings. The evidence of imagination becoming structure.

And everywhere the ropes, holding back nooks and stairwells and shadowed passages. I remember wanting to step over them so badly. To go find out. To slip into the forbidden room and see what the tour would not show me. I was full of longing, but not yet full of nerve. I kept to the walkway. That was the condition of me too.

At the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, my father stopped and named them for me. He loved Revelation — of all the books he was raised on, that one — and I think he loved it for the fantasy of it. The colored horses. The seals. The world ending in images. He named the four horsemen, and I never forgot them.

Years later I stood in front of painted horsemen and named them for my grown son, Donnie.

Some things get handed down at a railing. Some get handed down in front of the end of the world. Father to son to son, each of us receiving the old images and carrying them forward without quite knowing what they will become.

Circus World I can no longer place with certainty on that same trip. I think we drove on to Baraboo. I think there was a motel somewhere between. But I cannot be sure, and there is no one left to check with. What I am sure of is what it felt like: enormous.

Crowds pressing through the gate. Tigers. Elephants. The whole hot animal weight of that world. Dust, popcorn, sunburn, wagon paint, the sharp smell of hay and cages. A man crossed the river on a tightrope — on a bicycle — and it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. At some point a clown looked out over all those people and called the shy farm boy out of the audience.

And I went.

This weekend, Circus World was quiet.

Thin crowds. The big top smaller than the one in my head. Everything a little mustier, a little faded, past its era in a way that was not only sad and not only good. I told Erin about the man on the bicycle over the river, and there was nothing to point at. Just the vanished wonder, described to someone who will never get to see it. That is its own loneliness: the impossibility of proving what astonished you.

Some of the change is for the better. No elephants stand in cages there anymore, and I do not wish them back. I do not want the old world restored whole. The cost of some wonders was too high, even if I did not know it then. And the stunt show was genuinely good — human bodies doing what bodies can barely do, bodies becoming arcs and hinges and thrown faith. So it was not simple decline. It was change wearing decline’s clothes, and I had to hold both.

The grief hit harder there than at the rock.

I have been back to House on the Rock since — as a teenager, as an adult — and every return laid itself over the one before, wearing the original smooth. But Circus World I had been to as a child, with my parents, and never with them again. Nothing later came along to dilute it. No teenage boredom, no adult critique. It stayed sealed. The rarest shared thing cuts deepest.

There is a new playground now, and Arthur loved it. He climbed and ran and tested the limits of every structure, burning off the miles exactly as children are supposed to do. And watching him, it landed on me all at once:

My parents sat here.

Some bench right about there. My mother with the camera or the purse or the map. My father resting for a minute, watching me and my sister run the travel out of our legs. They sat where I was sitting, more or less. They watched what I was watching, more or less. They had the same parental half-smile, the same fatigue, the same private pleasure of seeing a child belong briefly and totally to a place.

I have become the watcher, and the watchers are gone.

Then, inside the hippodrome, a performer called Arthur out with three other kids and juggled pins right past their faces. He stood there in the middle of it, chosen, brave and uncertain and lit by the attention of the ring. The spectacle picked him the way the clown picked me, one generation apart, in the same building.

I did not arrange that. Some doublings arrange themselves.

Both of my parents are gone now — the one who held the camera and the one whose arm is around us. And the ache that surprised me was not quite the plain fact of that. I know they are gone. I live with that knowledge the way a house lives with weather. The sharper ache was the question underneath.

How did two farm parents even know about these places? Had they come before, without us? Did a billboard work on them from the side of the highway? Did an advertisement catch my mother one winter at the kitchen table? Did my father hear about it from someone at work? Did they save for it? Argue over it? Decide suddenly? Did they already know the feeling they wanted us to have?

They had a whole knowing that came before me, and I never thought to ask about it. Now the asking is over.

That is what gone turns out to mean. Not only that the people are absent. Not only that holidays change and houses empty and voices become recordings if you are lucky. It means the questions do not stop, but the answers do. The world is still full of doors, but the keys have been buried with the people who carried them.

Here is the thing about the song.

The nine-year-old heard a wordless machine in a dim room and kept it. He did not know Boléro. He had not heard “Kashmir” yet. The video game would not exist for years. Each of those arrived later and settled backward onto the bare sound, layer over layer, until the song I remembered was something the decades assembled. Not the thing I heard. The thing memory made out of hearing.

Of course it was different when I found it again. It had to be. The difference was not a failure of the machine. The difference was the evidence that I had lived.

That is why you cannot go back, and not all of it is the place’s fault.

The railings get rebuilt. The signs change. The tigers are retired. The elephants are gone, as they should be. The big top shrinks or your body grows. The rooms seem less impossible once you have spent a life learning how rooms are made.

But I did my own overwriting too.

At nine, every object in that house was undifferentiated wonder because I could not read any of it. I did not know styles, sources, fakery, craft, obsession, kitsch, genius, theft, preservation, spectacle, decay. I did not know what was valuable and what was only strange. I did not know how the trick worked, so everything was magic.

Now I can read nearly all of it. I spent the decades since learning to. I can see the joins, the references, the inventions, the compromises. I can admire more precisely and be fooled less completely. That is a gain, and it is also a loss. I cannot un-know my way back to the first astonishment.

I gained the knowing and buried the first wonder under it. Both are true, and they do not cancel.

Something was decided at that railing, or near it, in the summer I was nine. The eye. The looking. The hunger for rooms inside hills, for diagrams, for images of the world ending, for machines that play themselves in the dark. What I would spend a life doing. What I would keep trying to build.

I did not feel it happen. Maybe that is the only way it ever happens.

And then, decades later, you bring your own child to the place where some part of you was made. You hold up the old photograph and try to match the angle. You look for the wooden rail and find black metal. You look for your father and find your own reflection. You look for your mother and find the empty space behind the camera. You look for the boy in the Superman shirt and find your son, six years old, making a face and clutching a water bottle from another planet.

You hand forward what you were handed. Four horsemen to one son. A circus ring to another. Wonder, mistranslated but still alive. Memory, inaccurate but faithful. The old spell, spoken from somewhere close to the original spot.

Not the exact place.

One railing off.

Fog on the valley either way.