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It might look like an old threshing machine to you. It was my starship, pirates’ galleon, stagecoach, fort, submarine, B-25 bomber and fighter jet.
When I was a child on the farm, time stretched out before me, infinitely long, wide and deep — or so it seemed then. My mother and father worked like draft animals from dawn to dark, and even after I was old enough to assume the appropriate load of chores, most of my time was on my own hands. There were no flickering screens in our house, not even in the living room, until I was 10 or 12. There was no corner to hang out on, not for at least five miles of dirt road.
No matter. In the back corner of the farmyard sat an old abandoned thresher, an elephant-sized hulk of sheet metal and cast iron with ladders, a catwalk, what looked like a ship’s wheel, and some child-sized compartments. It was my starship, pirates’ galleon, stagecoach, fort, submarine, B-25 bomber and fighter jet. I didn’t go to movies, I made them, with no limitations whatsoever on special effects and casting.
My fantasy life wasn’t limited to the thresher, either. One fall afternoon clings to memory, for some reason, when I faced an opposing football team consisting of a double row of dried-out cornstalks, taking them out one at a time to the cheers of thousands assembled in the arena of our garden.
Now, I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist or an expert in anything, so I am not allowed to think, let alone write, the things I believe about this. (Hold my beer.)
It seems to me that imagination is a muscle of our mind, one that atrophies when not used. And it is obvious to me that children for some decades now have not been given the time or opportunity to exercise it. They are scheduled within an inch of their lives, and in every waking moment their attention is flogged away from their internal life and nailed to some crazy extremity (I’m talking to you, SpongeBob SquarePants).
I believe we are all paying a high price for that form of mental enslavement. Movies (in movie houses, on TV, on our smartphones), animated cartoons, commercials, music videos, animated games, talking and reactive dolls, highly detailed specific toys — all reach out and grab a kids mind before it has any time to blow a slow fragile bubble of imagination.
Not always. I’m sure I’m not the only parent to remember watching a child who had just opened a half-ton of sparkly, whirly, talking, animated Christmas presents, spend hours playing with the cardboard box one of them had been mailed in.
Children still know how to do that, given half a chance — no wait, let me correct that. They have to be given a whole chance, a gift of plenty of time, along with a complete lack of direction and an absence of all external motivation. Anyone who sees you treating your child that way is going to call social services on you. But if they don’t get that chance, once they are grown, never having used that muscle much, it simply will not work.
And as a result we have generations of privileged white people who cannot imagine being non white or unrich. We have whole populations who cannot imagine that an infectious disease is a real threat because they don’t have it, and neither does anyone they know. Who are unable to believe that global warming is real because where they are, it’s cold. Who cannot conceive of conditions that would cause a family to walk a thousand miles and seek a new life in another country. Who cannot think of any reason other than moral depravity that would lead a person into addiction.
People who are devoid of imagination find it easy to accept simplistic explanations of how things work: forests burn fiercely in California because they haven’t been raked; bleach could be good for COVID-19; all we have to do to have a better life is get rid of the (fill in the blank, one word only).
People who are devoid of imagination cannot experience compassion. If you cannot imagine what it’s like being me, how could you possibly feel empathy?
Of course I have the solution. We need to give every child in America an old threshing machine in their backyard, and the time to consider the possibilities. That’ll fix us.
Fighter jet and star ship are a stretch for the ungainly thresher, I think, but the rest I see; galleon, fort, sub, absolutely, and I definitely see the B-25 bomber aspect. Yeah, I can envision flying the unheralded Mitchel off a carrier deck, for the revenge run on Tokyo.
You could man all the gun positions, navigate, take over the bomb run as the bombardier, and issue concise orders from the pilot’s seat. “No unnecessary chatter boys, just call out those fighter’s.”
One of the reasons I consider myself the Master of Duct Tape, is I made so many duct tape balls as a kid. All different shapes and weights. Some were for indoor, some for outdoor, some were made for garage door hockey, some for living room soccer. My favorite was a duct tape baseball painstakingly crafted with an small oval rock at its core, that allowed for ungodly movement. You could throw something akin to a sweeping curve and it would morph mid-flight into a backdoor knuckleball.
The Silver Death ball was nearly un-catchable, and completely un-hittable, especially with the Old Broomy the broomstick, the only bat we were allowed to use in the backyard. Basically, it was dangerous, so I retired the ball, and placed the altered version back in the Pet Rock nest from which it was born.
We must be more alike than I suspect, since I completely agree. Maybe this makes me guilty of seeking out confirmation to satisfy one bias of many.
Also, minor typo : “Who can think of any reason other than moral depravity …” given the context, should be “cannot”.
I don’t think the problem is seeking confirmation. I think the problem is refusing to consider alternatives. Anyway, good catch on the typo, I fixed it.
That big machine – I had to feed it 2 summers in my early life. My folks would load me on a train in New York. An Aunt would get on near Chicago and transfer me to a train to Minneapolis where I would be transported to the Anoka area and Crown. They did not have combines yet (a thresher on wheels that cut the grain a separated the seed from the straw) right in the growing fields. So they cut and tie the product in the fields and wait for the big thresher to make the rounds and the farmers would co-op to help each other. Us kids would drive a pair of horses and a big hay wagon to deliver the cut product the noisy thresher that was powered by a huge belt from a tractor. My uncle was a kind of pillar of the community, active in the electrification of the area and manager of the local baseball team – no pansy softball for them. I remember him once saying that I was no more use than tits on a boar hog. I won’t mention the kinds of trouble I almost got into.
I like this one. There’s a lot to be said here about the importance of imagination.
My son (luckily) went to an old school that still set kids free for recess, in the playground they had a dome made of steel bars. In grade five he moved to a new modern school with a “safe” playground. I thought it was great, “He won’t get hurt!” He told me later that he hated the new school’s playground, because at the old one, he always pretended he was in space and had to get back to the space ship. He’s 25 and turned out pretty good.
That old thresher was as unsafe as any playground could possibly be. I got lots of cuts and bruises from it. Reason I’m
still licking today.
For me, it was The Big Tree; that’s what the kids called it, and a number of their parents as well. It stood tall and broad atop a ridge in a neglected scrub area adjacent to the otherwise well-groomed officers’ housing quarters in Fort Devens , MA.
I was a skinny, stuttering waif, the object of bullying from ‘the big kids’ – my older brother prominent among them…But they couldn’t follow me to the upper regions of The Big Tree: no one could. Leaping from limb to limb like a rhesus monkey, I was a natural climber. I could go up and out farther than any of the other kids dared. I could feel the strength and weakness in any limb. I understood the winds and how they affected my arboreal haven. As a youngster, I lived in fear of virtually everyone and everything. But in The Big Tree I was king!
Looking back, I can see that it was all instinctual; I didn’t even have to think about it. Even my mother understood. “Greggy, If you see any stray dogs, you climb up The Big Tree.” (For some odd reason Fort Devens was perennially plagued by packs of stray dogs. Apparently there was no military protocol for such a problem.)
Anyway, I didn’t know then what I know now – that it’s damned hard for a young primate to fall out of a tree. God bless The Big Tree.
PS: Late yesterday I returned from Vermont where we buried my brother. Jung wrote something about ‘synchronicity’. I’ll need to read up on that.
I am sorry for your loss. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I didn’t have a thresher but my mother raised free range children with library cards. We had freedom and the time to imagine becoming human.
Hold on tight to the part of your brother that lives in you Mr. Knepp.
Thank you, and Tom for that matter, for your condolences.